148 ALFRED T. SCHOFIELD, ESQ., M.D., M.R .C.S., ETC., ON 



for a day. If it be the learning of some steps in dancing they 

 should never be changed till fixed in the brain. Again, 

 it is of great importance, and this has a very wide applica- 

 tion to the training of children, that the habit be taught and 

 executed accurately. If the steps are taught in a slovenly 

 way they will always be executed in a slovenly manner. 



If a child learns sometimes that two and two make 

 five, and at other times that they make four, there will 

 always be confusion in the mind or brain paths as the case 

 may be. 



Again, there is a great tendency in the young for all 

 repeated acts to become fixed habits, as in maldng grimaces, 

 or the use of slang words. 



In those whose intellect is deficient this is far more 

 marked. All such cases are creatures of strong habit and 

 routine, and they like everything done at the same time 

 each day. Miss Martineau tells us of an idiot who required 

 any new thing done to be repeated at the same hour each 

 subsequent day. His hands were washed and nails cut at 

 11.10 one meriting, and next morning at exactly the same 

 hour he came to have it done again, and yet he had no 

 knowledge of time, and could not tell it on a clock. There 

 must have been some very accurate unconscious cerebral 

 process that told him when the twenty-four hours had 

 elapsed. If seven sweets were given him one day, he would 

 take neither six nor eight the next. 



Again, fresh nerve paths tend to consolidate apart from 

 actual repetition. A new task learned in the evening 

 becomes easier to perform each morning than it was the 

 night before, and easier still on Monday'' morning than it was 

 on Saturday evening. The Germans go so far as to say that 

 we learn to skate in summer and to swim in winter. What 

 is exactly meant is that having been taught skating one 

 winter, we go on learning it unconsciously all through the 

 summer, or that we begin much better next winter than we 

 left off at the end of the preceding one. 



Attention in the formation of the habit seems greatly to 

 deepen its impression on the brain, and make it much more 

 easy to establish. A good memory, which is a psychical 

 habit, is thus established by attention. 



Results of formed habit. — A formed habit of average com- 

 plication produces a sort of reflex peristaltic nerve current 

 between the associated groups of cells. Supposing it is a 

 question of learning the clog dance and alternately tapping 



