384 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



quality of its yield." Five thousand persons are killed by steam 

 power and machinery in England and Wales annually. Sir Will- 

 iam Fairbairn says : " These deaths are mostly occasioned by the 

 ignorance or clumsiness of the hands to whom machines were 

 intrusted; occurring singly as they do, and making monoto- 

 nously similar newspaper paragraphs, we become brutalized and 

 fail to take in the enormity of the destruction." America could 

 show no better record ; it is as if ten times the number of persons 

 who make up both Houses of Congress should be brought together 

 and visibly blown to pieces, scalded, and crushed, by bodily clum- 

 siness and defective training. In England, for lack of the kinder- 

 garten or infant school, fifteen hundred children are scalded or 

 burned to death each year, and probably more in America. 



What is manual training ? It is the subjugation of the hand 

 and arm (an appendage of the head) to the direction of the brain, 

 so that they shall touch some definite point, or exert some defi- 

 nite measured force, in obedience to the will, at the exact instant 

 desired. 



When should it begin ; and what are likely to be its effects on 

 the common weal ? 



The human hand is, of all instruments, the most wonderful. 

 Sixty years ago Sir Charles Bell, the great anatomist, who discov- 

 ered that the nerve filaments of sensation are distinct from those 

 of motion, wrote a volume on The Hand, its Mechanism and 

 Endowments, as evincing Design. In the intervening years so 

 much has been learned of the relation of the nervous elements to 

 the muscular fibers which they animate and control, and so much 

 of the effects of the interaction of the brain and hand in those 

 processes which we call " reflex," that another and most interest- 

 ing volume might now be written on the hand in these aspects. 

 It has been definitely ascertained that there are certain limited 

 areas of the brain which control and direct the motions of certain 

 limbs and no other ; and as in the production of certain definite 

 motions e. g., those used in sewing or piano-playing this definite 

 related area of the brain is called into exercise, why may not its 

 repeatedly being aroused to action promote its growth and per- 

 fection as surely as exercise of the blacksmith's muscle causes its 

 growth and the perfection of its finely compacted fibers ? 



But, speculations aside, experience proves that the education 

 of the hand can be begun at three years in the kindergarten, so that 

 the child, whose supple and growing fingers have been taught to 

 move in definite directions for definite ends, has at six a long start 

 in manual dexterity ahead of the child whose maturing joints 

 have been neglected. Our great-grandmothers taught their daugh- 

 ters to make " fine shirts for papa," neatly and thoroughly, at 

 what seems to us an incredibly early age ; and now that the hand 



