Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/811

Rh and other creatures dear to a child's fancy. The results are undoubtedly wild, but they are full of promise.

The main point in these suggestions is that the language and science and drawing, thus cut down to the possible and essential, shall be as sincere and as real as the best insight of the teacher can make them. We can do all this and have plenty of time left for the cultivation of the body and the senses.

And we must begin this bodily culture by getting on good terms with our body, by admitting it to honorable fellowship with the mind. We must not be ashamed of our brother, the body. We must want it to be as subtile and pure and strong and beautiful and unashamed as is our spirit. It is a poor education which does not teach boys and girls to walk and run, skate and swim, ride and row, throw and jump, for upon these physical powers joy and health and life, the full and complete life, depend much more than they do upon such formal studies as arithmetic, for example. This bodily culture has an assured place in the rational curriculum, a scheme which fails signally if it does not produce vigorous bodies and warm hearts quite as surely as informed minds. Our motto is the one that you may read at Herder's grave in the quaint old Stadt-Kirche at Weimar: "Licht, Liehe, Lehen."

This increased time also makes possible the enlarged faculty training which a rational scheme demands. The present manual-training work has only to be enlarged so as to include all the faculties, speech and hearing, taste and smell, as well as touch and sight, and to do it not as so many drill exercises, but along the line of human interest and motive. It may seem to you a little fanciful that I include the sense of smell as a serious object of culture. But experiment shows that much of the gratification we get from food is wrapped up in the odor, and our life depends upon our food. Further, odors are the carriers of many helpful and delightful memories. A keen sense of smell means enlarged life, besides being a source of direct pleasure, and a safeguard against noxious influences.

All the senses are to be brought to a high state of perfection, so that they may comprehensively and accurately report the outer world, and by their mental reactions may build up a nerve tissue in the brain of high sensitiveness and power. The possible exercises along these lines are simply unending, and the more intimately they are prompted by the artistic conception of life, the more wonder-working will they be. From this point of view singing is quite as integral a part of voice culture as speaking, while instrumental music not only offers an opportunity for valuable æsthetic culture, but as well a physical co-ordination of sight, hearing, and touch that we simply