PRACTICAL PHASES OF MENTAL FATIGUE. 523 



Doubtless every one has observed how readily he becomes fa- 

 tigued when he is engaged in activities demanding very delicate 

 muscular adjustments threading a needle, for instance. Work of 

 this character involves particularly the higher co-ordinating areas 

 of the brain, those controlling the more precise and elaborate ad- 

 justments of the body, and this work makes large demands upon one's 

 nervous energy. This seems to be pre-eminently true of the child, in 

 whose brain the highest regions are yet comparatively undeveloped, 

 so that much exercise of them leads quickly to exhaustion. Those 

 activities, then, which compel a great amount of exact co-ordination 

 of young children will easily fatigue them. The writer has for some 

 time been observing the effect of various sorts of playthings upon 

 the activities, particularly upon the emotions, of two young children. 

 He has noticed that those plays requiring most accurate co-ordina- 

 tion, as stringing kindergarten beads with small openings or writing 

 with a hard lead pencil, will quickly produce fatigue, shown in irri- 

 tability, discontent, and lack of control; while those plays which 

 employ the larger muscles, as working in sand or drawing a cart, are 

 more enduring in their interest and are not attended by such dis- 

 agreeable after effects. It is customary, however, in many homes 

 and schools to require of the youngest children the finest work in 

 the management of the smallest tools and materials, such, for in- 

 stance, as writing on very narrow spaced paper, greater freedom 

 being permitted in this respect as the pupil grows older an inver- 

 sion of the natural order. The mode of development of the nerv- 

 ous system indicates unmistakably that in all training the individual 

 should proceed gradually from the acquirement of strength and 

 force in large, coarse, and relatively inexact movements to the ac- 

 quisition of skill in precisely co-ordinated activities. 



Any reference to the remediable casues of mental fatigue would 

 be incomplete without allusion to the harmful influence of certain 

 personal characteristics in the people with whom we associate. By 

 virtue of a great law of our being, that of suggestion, the importance 

 of which we are appreciating more fully from day to day, we tend 

 ever to reproduce within ourselves the activities of the things 

 in our environment.* !Now, when we are forced to remain in the 

 presence of one fatigued, as pupils too frequently are in the school 

 and children in the home, and this fatigue manifests itself in irrita- 

 bility, impatience, tension of voice, and constraint of face and body 

 in such an environment we become overstimulated ourselves and 

 rapidly waste our energies. Especially true is this of children, who 

 are more suggestible than adults; and, in view of this, one can ap- 



* Cf. Sidis, The Psychology of Suggestion; and Vernon Lee and C. A. Thompson, 

 Beauty and Ugliness, Contemporary Review, vol. Ixxii, pp. 544-569 and 669-688. 



