Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/787

Rh  of the body. This necessity comes more speedily upon workingmen than on men of leisure, earlier upon children than upon mature persons. An infant at the breast could be entirely deprived of food for only a short time without serious harm, while a sound man, with other conditions favorable, can bear a privation of several days.

A time of several hours passes between the taking of food and its complete utilization in the body. During this time, especially after hearty meals, the mental vigor is diminished in a marked degree. Later it gradually rises, and the susceptibility to fatigue diminishes.

When now we look back at the conditions we have discovered that control mental vigor, we conclude that our children are exposed by the extent and arrangement of study-work in the schools to great perils for their mental and physical development. The questions that press upon us on this matter are of such importance that we all have reason to give them our full, undivided attention. We are only at the beginning of a real hygiene of mental labor, but the results we have obtained in this research, fully indicating the nature and operation of the dangers, point with equal clearness to the character of the preventive and remedial measures which should be sought and applied.



ONG before the sciences were pressing their claim to equal rank with ancient learning at Harvard, before Jefferson had seen the establishment of the University of Virginia working under the system of elective studies which he had planned, or before the magnificently endowed institutions of technology were giving what Herbert Spencer regards as knowledge of most worth, we find the beginnings of these things in the newly established university of a State that could boast of only two schools which taught more than the three R's and the very rudiments of the English language.

This modern plan of instruction offered by the University of North Carolina more than one hundred years ago was the work of a committee of six. Two of this committee were graduates of Princeton, one a graduate and ex-professor of the University of Pennsylvania, two had been students of Harvard, but their education at Cambridge had been interrupted by the Revolutionary War, and the sixth was an eminent lawyer. The names of these men were Samuel McCorkle, David Stone, Alfred Moore, Samuel 