Page:The physical training of children (IA 39002011126464.med.yale.edu).pdf/24

 the child are clearly given. In this country children are sent to school far too young. The mind is over-taxed before the body has had time to develop, and a debilitated constitution is too often the result. It is of little consequence whether a child reads at six years or not until it is ten. First develop the physical, then at the proper time the vigorous intellect will climb the hill of knowledge, leaving far behind the student whose constitution was destroyed by over-crowding the brain during the tender age of childhood.

"The main design of nature in early youth, is not the speedy development of the mind,—for she has designedly, as it were, withheld this agent,—but the development and growth of the body, by means of the nutritive functions so carefully provided for the purpose. All the energies of the constitution are then required for the promotion of this object; and if the brain be then cultivated too assiduously, these energies are abstracted from their legitimate purpose, and physical debility, ending most probably in disease and decay is produced. Does it not thus clearly and manifestly appear, that premature and too exclusive mental cultivation is to thwart nature by interfering with her operations in the careful development of the physical constitution of youth?"

It was the opinion of Rosseau "that the chief art of education in childhood is to lose time; that every delay should be considered an advantage, care being taken not to give that instruction to-day which may be deferred, without danger, till to-morrow." The same writer says: "The most critical interval of human life is that between the