Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 60.djvu/424

416 teacher fails utterly to appreciate, nay often deliberately excommunicates! The adult, as a rule, by reason of his own artificially produced 'normality,' neglects or represses those 'genial moments' of childhood, which are kith and kin with the 'inspiration' and 'intoxication' of those greatest of the race whom we recognize sooner or later as true geniuses. Another characteristic of childhood is the rapidity with which the change from play to rest, from brilliancy to apparent stupidity, from action to inaction bodily and mental can be made, and vice versa. This is particularly noticeable in American school-children, whose power of summoning up their reserve knowledge or strength (often with almost entire neglect of regular training) is remarkable. The records of the amateur dramatics, of the young people's associations of all kinds, religious as well as secular, of sports and games (here the English boy and girl count too) even, amply demonstrate this. Time and again has the instructor, driven to despair by the neglect, inattention and apparent stupidity of those in his charge, been moved to admiration by their performances when the critical moment arrived. This power of childhood, too, has been largely overlooked, or unavailed of, unappealed to, in our schools, where the desire has always been to make sure of the accomplishment of the task set by actual demonstration of the pupil's parts, rather than, by indirection, to make sure that the latent genius will, in the right setting, assert itself in a fashion unattainable by the mere artificialities of hetero-persuasion and compulsion. In this respect we have still much to learn from the philosophy of primitive peoples.

Woman.—At first blush woman would seem to be an exception to the theory outlined in these pages. The popular saying has it 'woman's work is never done,' and Professor O. T. Mason has shown the immense amount of labor of all sorts, from the care of the tribal religion to the merest drudgery, that has been performed by her. Says Havelock Ellis: "The tasks which demand a powerful development of muscle and bone, and the resulting capacity for intermittent spurts of energy, involving corresponding periods of rest, fall to the man; the care of the children and all the very various industries which radiate from the hearth, and which call for an expenditure of energy more continuous but at a lower tension, fall to the woman." But he admits that 'the exceptions are very numerous.' And woman has been so long under an artificial régime inspired by man's belief in her inferiority that many of the phenomena of work are with her no longer naïve, natural or strictly evolutional in character. The women of the Seris, e. g., possess a good deal of the marked characteristics of the men in respect to intense activity, continued rest and rapid transition