262 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



What is there in this comparatively immense expenditure of time and 

 energy upon Latin that will develop organs and functions continuously 

 available for the boy's mental efficiency and usefulness in the world? 

 How does a nervous mechanism, with its infinitely complex system of 

 neurones and connecting fibers, fashioned through and for the study 

 of the Latin language, become adapted for all other mental processes? 

 In short, it is time to read a new and compelling significance into the 

 old query of instinctive common sense as to what is the value of the 

 so-called culture that is doled out to our children in the secondary 

 schools and colleges. 



Having thus answered the first question involved in our proposition, 

 it remains to consider the further question of what becomes of useless 

 organs of culture. What is the effect upon the girl's life of having to 

 support an elaborate nervous mechanism for dealing with mathematical 

 symbols and concepts which she never has occasion to use? What is 

 the effect upon the boy's life of having to support a nervous mechanism 

 for declining Latin nouns and adjectives, conjugating Latin verbs, and 

 construing Latin sentences, which he never has occasion to use? May 

 not these unused nervous organs become parasitic upon the nervous 

 vitality, just as the unused muscles of the athlete become parasitic 

 upon the general organic vitality? It may seem to some little less 

 than fantastic to suggest such a result. And yet, if we believe that 

 life is a biological unit, and that the laws controlling it are identical in 

 nature and operation, there is no escaping this conclusion. Moreover, 

 there are many peculiarities in the nervous and psychic constitutions 

 of a considerable number of educated men and women that await a 

 plausible theory to account for them. The suspicion is harbored in 

 many minds that academic communities are apt to become over-cultured. 

 They are apt to lose that balance between perceptual and conceptual 

 experience which is the supreme test of healthy-mindedness. At the 

 very best, they suffer from an hypertrophy of the critical faculties, 

 which reveals itself in philosophical and linguistic hair-splitting. At 

 the worst, it may amount to a nervous tension and general intellectual 

 straining after precision in scholarship and propriety in conduct that 

 creates an atmosphere blighting to spontaneity of work and life in the 

 students. This is frequently illustrated in schools and colleges for 

 girls, where an excess of women teachers, with hypertrophied intellects 

 and atrophied human interests, make education a process of mental 

 arrest and disease instead of growth. 



Outside of academic communities, there are to be found everywhere 

 a cultured flotsam and jetsam. Europe has long had its proletariat of 

 culture, and America is rapidly developing one. In the more intense 

 nervous life of America, moreover, there are appearing numerous types 

 of nervous instability among educated men and women. This is illus- 

 trated not only in the frequent neurasthenia of the cultured classes. It 



