1 02 EDUCATION. 



measure, to ask his questions and express his thoughts 

 in writing. Eeflecting nerve should be taught to act. 

 Acting nerve should be taught to reflect. 



The close observer of body, parentage, and proclivity 

 (the physiologist in fact) can give great help when the 

 time comes to choose a vocation. It is an amazing 

 fact, by the way, that teachers are rarely consulted 

 touching the character, capabilities, and fitness of 

 those whom they teach, whom they are able, most 

 impartially, to judge and understand. For when nerve 

 failings have been corrected and nerve overflow 

 checked, nerve endowments and proclivities have still 

 to be reckoned with. Is it well, for example, to make 

 a barrister of a young fellow who takes after a speech- 

 less parent ? Or a science student of a garrulous 

 youth who inherits no faculty either of observation, or 

 reflection, or inference ? Why put to a calling which 

 demands abstract thought one who inherits a prefer- 

 ence for detail and action ? Why put to affairs the 

 counterpart of a pensive and poetic parent ? 



To find out the sort of training and circumstance 

 which makes better nerve will one day be our first 

 care. Some of the circumstance we can reach and 

 change, some we cannot. Education and marriage 

 are in some measure within reach. Marriage is, for 

 good or evil, the most potent nerve changer ; it stands 

 foremost in either blessing or cursing men, women, 

 and children. Yet physiology, which teaches all this, 

 is the one knowledge which we, led in the past by 

 theologians and by purely literary persons, have 

 ignored and jeered at. A few generations of, quite 

 accidental, fortunate marriages, in which good and 

 helpful nerve qualities (often silent qualities) come 

 together, and in which bad and hindering nerve is left 



