224 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tone ; but to enter the colt for the race, to bloom and seed the young 

 plant, or to put the young male to the stud, is to stint their growth and 

 to exhaust their vigor. Precocity is gained at the cost of feeble ma- 

 turity and early decay. And yet, can the young brain grow, cell add 

 itself to cell, and fibre knit itself to fibre, without work and play ? Can 

 the slack sinew be braced, or the muscle which is idle be increased? 

 To this I would reply that the activity which feeds the waxing strand 

 and ganglion is rather receptive than productive. 1 It is easy to forget 

 how the child and the youth drink in knowledge and virtue impercepti- 

 bly as the green leaves spread themselves and feed upon the air. By 

 an equable tide flowing in from every side by the channels of the 

 senses, by the universal surface of the skin the inner chambers of the 

 nervous system are expanded, and stored with riches for future profu- 

 sion. The mischief done daily by calling upon the unripe brain for 

 productive work, for original composition, 2 for competitive examina- 

 tions, for teaching, and even for preaching, is calamitous, and the evil 

 is increasing. The impatient examinations of young children are as 

 injurious and as foolish as the searching of the roots of the pushing 

 plant. Cram, again, is that which secures the immediate production of 

 brain-results rather than the growth of the brain itself; and it must be 

 thrusting itself upon the vision of all but the moon-struck, that young 

 men who are prize-winners at the ages even of eighteen or twenty years 

 have too often spent their brains before the natural yielding-time. Too 

 often the star of their year is quenched ere their course be well begun, and 

 if their life be not henceforth a failure it may fall far short of its early 

 promise ; and the brain which might have been year by year more flexi- 

 ble, more potent, and more enterprising, is warped, stiffened, and staled. 

 Such young men are now sent into the world in numbers, with minds 

 orderly, trim, and garnished, but without blan, and without initiative 

 admirable clerks and formalists but as men of action spoiled forever. 

 Pupil-teachers, again, present a curious subject for observation, and 

 a sad one. Called upon as children to teach children, their brains turn 

 backward, or stop at the stage they have attained, and the living stream 

 of thought is congealed into a dead dogmatism. Their minds, no lon- 

 ger open to the dew of knowledge from above, are bent to the work of 

 churning vapid juices for yet callower nurslings. Nor is this all : the 

 striving and jaded brain sucks the kindly sap from the rest of the body, 

 and the weaker sex more especially tend in their years of puberty to 

 become pallid and enfeebled, or to break down altogether between the 

 rival claims of mind and body. Other cases, of which my note-books 

 are full, are those in which brain-power is run low in youth by the 

 untimely pressure of business and of heavy responsibilities. A father 



1 That receptiveness of brain, its play and its productiveness, are but various degrees 

 of function I do not forget, but few differences of degree are more clearly distinguishable. 



2 I believe in many schools mere children are ordered to write " original " essays on 

 set subjects. 



