Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/348

344 preventable, at least in part. It is the duty of the physician to recognize and promptly rectify the evil effects of environment and training, and in so far as possible of inheritance. Hence it is a most important department of differentiation to possess clearly defined standards of growth, proportion, activities, sensitiveness, functional competence, intelligence and capacity for endurance. These standards should be the product of wide observation, reading and experience, among normal as well as abnormal conditions, but unless tempered by judgment, right conclusions are not assured.

The prototype for each teacher and physician is the ideal child, a composite picture of normal children, and can not be formed too carefully by a thorough interpretation of all data at command. Next to the ideal child the teacher should erect for himself standards with permissible variants. In America we must not limit our attention to children of pure Anglo-Saxon stock, but hold in view the many other racial characteristics with which we are likely to come in contact. There are crosses of the Latin, Celt, Slav, German, Hebrew and other white races; also the hybrids of red, yellow and black races. These modifications exhibit laws of their own, as yet by no means clear, but deeply significant. Inheritance of tendencies is recognized as a potential factor. Predisposition to physical and moral derangement is an obvious factor, admittedly forceful for harm.

Difficulties of differentiation are many enough among children normal in structure, in neural balance and in mind, but these grow greater where constitutional variations or deviations are present. Hence it is desirable to weigh variants in type, such as peculiar and exceptional children. The normal processes are profoundly modified by peculiarities of temperament due to inheritance or acquired. E. W. Bohannon in a statistical study of over 1,000 children (Pediatric Seminary, Oct., 1894) covers the ground sufficiently to warrant using his classification. The psychic factor demands deeper attention in pedagogics than ordinarily obtains.

Bohannon formulates certain types of mental and physical conformation:

These types are the heavy, the tall, the stout, the small, the strong, the weak, the deft, the agile, the clumsy, the beautiful, the ugly, the deformed, those with birth marks, the keen and the mentally precocious, those with defects of sense organs or mind, the nervous, the clean, the dainty, the dirty, the disorderly, the teasing, the buoyant, buffoons, the cruel, the selfish, the generous, the sympathetic, those with imagination, the liar, the ill-tempered, the silent, the dignified, the frank, the loquacious, the inquisitive, the courageous, the timid, the whining, the spoiled, the gluttonous, and 'the only child in a family.'

Many of these types cross; several are liable to include similar features, constituting composites of the types, making the study somewhat complicated if carried to legitimate conclusions.