3 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tance as constituting part of the ordinary mental life of invertebrate 

 animals. Movements thus initiated will be found to afford a basis 

 for the development of many so-called instinctive acts. 



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PKENATAL AND INFANTILE CULTURE. 1 



By Dr. E. SEGUIN. 



TO educate children for themselves is rare in Europe, and is 

 considered rather quixotic. The youth of the people are mer- 

 chantable commodities, soon to be credited to the party which puts 

 its stamp upon them. Therefore, when they are worth having, they 

 are picked up as eagerly as nuggets. Priests pretend to teach them 

 to think, yet care only to impose upon them a belief which implies 

 obedience to their craft ; Kaisers claim their direction, not to elevate 

 them, but to put them among their droves of subjects ; bourgeois and 

 manufacturers give them a minimum of instruction, just sufficient to 

 insure their working dependence, and to qualify their own sons to be 

 fed at the public expense ; while the working-men themselves de- 

 moralized by such examples put their apprentices at menial employ- 

 ment, and cheat them out of their rightful technical training. 



From this standpoint we consider European children as in four 

 groups : those who receive no education ; those who do not receive 

 the education they need ; those who receive an education which dis- 

 qualifies them for work ; and those whose education prepares them 

 for work. From another point of view we saw that the European 

 children enter the school younger, are trained longer, and are ad- 

 vanced further, than the Americans. As a consequence of this last 

 contrast, we shall have less to say about the primary and' grammar 

 schools, and more about the infantile and the professional. We will 

 leave the other consequences to issue naturally from observation. 



1. The Cradle. At the Vienna Exposition there was a pavilion 

 de V enfant (infant pavilion), a room replete with the necessaries of 

 the nursery and also with its superfluities intended altogether to 

 represent the unbounded wishes of a mother for her baby's comfort 

 and happiness. This palace of luxurious nursing ought, in the esti- 

 mation of the writer, to have been accompanied by a little manual of 

 what is necessary to protect and to prepare life before nativity, in re- 

 lation to what may be called foetal education. 



During this first period the feelings come mainly through reflex 

 impressions from the mother, a process which not only lays the foun- 

 dation of health and vitality, but which forms the deeper strata of 



1 Extracts from the Report of the Commissioners of the United States to the Inters 

 national Exhibition held at Vienna, 1S73. 



