Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/665

Rh hundred boys, and over periods ranging from a few months to as many years, and one can not know them and be interested in them without reaching a number of generalizations about them. I have come to be very fearful of the development of any boy who is markedly clumsy, and I have come as the result of experience to mistrust the reliability of his mental processes.

I am not fond of Calvin. I think he did little to set free the spirit of man. But I find in the limitations imposed by the bodily organism a predestination as real and as bitter as any that Calvin taught.

If we go one step further toward the extreme of acknowledged deficiency, we shall meet still more striking testimony. This pathological region is a most depressing one and to be entered unwillingly, but health has undoubtedly gained much by a study of disease. The localization of brain action has been established for psychologists by the study of abnormal cases and by accidents. Where death or the necessity for some surgical operation has made it possible to examine into the brain structure, the most intimate connection has always been found between function and organ, and between special function and special organ. A failure in the power of speech, or the loss of any special faculty brought about by sudden accident, can always be traced to the injury of some part of the brain tissue. Sometimes the injury is so vital that the tissue is completely impaired, and in that case I believe there is no hope of recovering the lost faculty. But sometimes an operation can restore the normal order. A clot of blood has perhaps been formed and presses against some center. When the clot is removed, and with it the undue pressure, the lost faculty is restored. You will find many such instances recorded in the pages of experimental psychologies. But the application for us, in studying the results of manual training, lies in the thought that the poor, undeveloped brain centers in the deficient might be strengthened by exercise brought about at the extremities. It is a logical suggestion. The bodily faculties are peripheral, the brain central. As a matter of experience, and as a necessary inference from our philosophy, the interaction between them is complete. The health of one means the health of the other.

Following this thought, manual training has been introduced as a therapeutic agent in the treatment of feeble-minded and deficient children, as at Elwyn, Pennsylvania, and in the treatment of the morally oblique, as at the Elmira Reformatory, New York. The results are now matters of statistics, and are probably in part known to you all. Nothing has been found quite so effective in concentrating the wandering attention of the feeble-minded and in co-ordinating their mental and bodily movements as just this manual activity. In