336 Kansas Academy of Science. 



leisure times badly, and the world will be a far happier place 

 in which to live when people learn to get their pleasures with 

 other people and not at the expense of other people. 



Only those school subjects, therefore, are valuable which 

 function in the after lives of the pupils, increasing their wis- 

 dom to its limits, giving skill in the use of their powers of mind 

 and body, and adding valuable information and wholesome 

 pleasures. 



Such studies will be vocational, equipping for farm and 

 garden, business, shop, or household; personal and environ- 

 mental, teaching sanitation and personal hygiene and giving 

 skill in observation and facility in the use of the inductive or 

 scientific method of gathering information and of reasoning; 

 informational, supplying those past and present experiences 

 of the race which will guide future conduct; social, making 

 such studies of man's relationship with man as will make him 

 a better citizen and neighbor; professional, preparing for 

 various special lines of activity; representative, endowing the 

 pupil with power to express thought and feeling with the 

 tongue, pen, pencil, brush or graver's tool, and giving him the 

 ability to understand and enjoy the thoughts and feelings of 

 others when thus expressed; and vibrational, attuning his 

 mind and body to the highest and sweetest harmonies of pipe, 

 string and reed. 



If this paper has seemed to overemphasize the importance 

 of heredity and to underestimate the value of schools, the 

 writer has not so intended. While it is true that millions of 

 species of plants and lower animals and certain races of man 

 and many families of the more progressive races have become 

 nearly static, and are therefore stay-behinds in evolution, it is 

 also true that many other species and parts of species are not 

 yet through changing their responses to an unfavorable en- 

 vironment or to an increasingly favorable environment, and 

 are constantly modifying certain parts of their bodies through 

 disuse or increased use. Man, according to Wiedershiem 

 ("Structure of Man," pp. 200 to 205), is modifying the struc- 

 ture and function of about sixty parts of his body through 

 changed response, and is causing nearly one hundred twenty 

 other parts to become vestigial through disuse. The nerve 

 cells of the brain with their axones and dendrites can but be 

 modified in a similar way through use and disuse, especially in 



