646 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the treatment of tlie morally oblique, manual training lias proved a 

 veritable redeeming force. Dr. Barr, tbe cbief physician at Elwyn, 

 writes me : " The secret of the development of the imbecile lies un- 

 doubtedly in manual training. The schools for the feeble-minded in 

 England and on the Continent, recognizing this, have gone far along 

 this line, while we have wasted years in trying to force abstract 

 theories upon mental defectives. Surely a truer thing was never said 

 than ' The working hand makes strong the working brain.' " Mr. 

 Bates, the director of manual training at the Elmira Reformatory, 

 sends me the following striking letter: 



" The influence of manual training processes upon the originally 

 selected defectives was so marked that the Board of Managers unani- 

 mously decided to increase it so as to take five hundred of the special 

 defectives, classed as follows: 



" Group 1 are those mathematically defective, those who fail 

 continuously in arithmetic, failures beginning with ' evening kinder- 

 garten,' and continuing into Set 1 and Set 2, in which advanced 

 problems in percentage are taught. 



" We find that by manual processes judiciously selected and prop- 

 erly taught, keeping the object in view in each case, we are able to 

 assist men to acquire the necessary proficiency in elementary mathe- 

 matics to pass in their respective arithmetic sets. I give you in 

 advance of our 1898 yearbook, statistics on that point as follows: 



" Out of an actual number of pupils — viz., fifty-eight in Group 1 

 — we have to show graduation of thirty-four, which is fifty-eight per 

 cent — that is, returned to the usual reformatory treatment as sus- 

 ceptible to the conditions governing their release. 



" Our second group deals with the men who are assigned for the 

 development of ' self-control,' which comprises by far our largest 

 assignment — viz., two hundred pupils, made up of men who are intel- 

 lectually bright in most cases, but this intellectuality runs riot, so 

 that they are habitually breaking the demeanor regulations in the 

 institution, and so must regularly be depressed in grade and their time 

 of commitment correspondingly lengthened. We select for such 

 men manual processes calculated to overcome, by the concentration 

 of mind and regularity of muscular movement, the defective element 

 in their nature. 



" We are able to show out of an actual number of pupils — viz., 

 one hundred and seven — twenty-three per cent as having been re- 

 turned susceptible to the reformatory treatment. The moral influ- 

 ence of the manual training department is better observed from this 

 group than any other. We note a particular instance of a man 

 assigned to the manual training from the third grade (incorrigibles), 

 who had committed almost all the crimes known to prison life. After 



