NATIONAL NECESSITIES AND EDUCATION. 445 



mental and physical qualities of every person into faithful harmony 

 and good-will. 



I, like some of my colleagues at the School Board, would break up 

 the monotony of the schoolmaster and the schoolmistress, and would 

 give those excellent workers as much variety of teaching as any of 

 them could desire. But that variety should be physical, not mental ; 

 play, rather than work ; training of the muscles, and, I may say, of 

 the skeleton too ; of the lungs, of the heart, of the digestive organs ; 

 of brain and nerve for action not of brain alone, and again brain, 

 and brain, hour by hour, all the day long. I, like others of my col- 

 leagues, would encourage economy, not by keeping things as they are, 

 but by saving some part of the two fifths of the money now expended 

 on teaching to spell, and by laying it out in teaching how to walk 

 with grace and ease ; to sing with correctness ; to swim ; to learn the 

 use of the arms, and fingers, and hands ; and to become men and 

 women in the strict sense of the word, without danger of retrograd- 

 ing a hair's breadth in the Darwinian line. 



I said, in my address at the Health Congress, at Brighton, what 

 was quite true, that I had never in my life seen a healthy child, by 

 which I meant that I had never seen a child that had not in it either 

 some actual or latent constitutional disease. Touching the subject 

 now in hand, it is equally true to say that it is all but impossible to 

 find, in the board schools of our large towns, any semblance, critically 

 viewed, of health. Constitutional taints, which under favorable cir- 

 cumstances may often be concealed, and which may or may not be 

 apparent, are there. Various conditions of disease are there, inde- 

 pendently of the tendency from heredity ; there of themselves, in 

 some irregularity of body or limb, in some imperfection of sense, in 

 some deficiency of quality of blood, in some feebleness of respiration, 

 in some nervous irregularity of function, in some shade of mental 

 aberration. 



The field of disease which is presented in some of the schools situ- 

 ated in crowded localities is indeed a sight at once for anxiety and pity. 

 To the eye of a physician who, like myself, has spent many years in 

 dispensary practice, it tells a story which is absolutely painful, if he 

 permit the results to be calculated out in his mind at leisure hours ; 

 if, that is to say, he compares what he has witnessed in his survey 

 with what he has learned, from long observation, of the meaning of 

 the phenomena in the history of life. It is not necessary to strip the 

 children, percuss and sound the chest, examine the spine, or practice 

 any of those refined arts of diagnosis with which he is familiar. He 

 reads from the indications of temperament, of expression of counte- 

 nance, of color of skin, of position of limb, of build of body, of gait, 

 of voice, sufficient outward manifestation to discern what is the true 

 physical state, what are the stamp and extent of disease, what is the 

 vital value of the lives generally that are before him. 



