266 REPORTS ON THE STATE OF SCIENCE. — 1916. "^^ 



given place quite recently to a more hopeful attitude, chiefly as a result 

 of various studies by Winch, in which definite results are claimed as 

 the result of a strictly scientific procedure. 



It is possible, therefore, that interest in the relations of fatigue in 

 industry and education will now revive ; but there are many important 

 respects in which the conditions of school and factory respectively affect 

 the study of fatigue. First of all, there is the general consideration 

 that according to meny modem educationists any conception of the 

 school which approximates educational to industrial conditions is in 

 itself a gross abuse. The object of the school should be to avoid all 

 that leads to premature fatigue, and it is therefore only in ill-managed 

 undesirable cases that we can casually step into the school in the 

 expectation of finding measurable fatigue.' 



Even where modern conditions still allow of fatigue it must be 

 regarded very differently from the fatigue of the factory. In The 

 Great Society Graham Wallas writes: ' The stimulation of our nervous 

 system along any given line of discharge makes a further stimulation 

 along the same line more easy. It also " uses up " something in the 

 nervous structure which requii-es time to repair. Every teacher knows 

 that if a boy has to spend two hours in doing a succession of elementary 

 sums of the same kind, he will do them with growing ease qua habit 

 and growing difficulty qua fatigue. After a period of rest the fatigue 

 wears off and the habit remains, so that a boy may then prove to have 

 been making most progress towards accuracy in sum-working when he 

 was too tired to work his sum accurately. ' 



This fatigue in the process of learning, this conception of progress 

 cannot easily be paralleled in the factory. Extra effort is never stimu- 

 lated in the factory with a view to the fonnation of habit ! The majority 

 of mental tests as employed on school children are the same as those of 

 the laboratory, and have not been essentially modified in the past sixteen 

 years. Leuba's remarks of 1899 still hold good: — 



' The mental test, ' he then wrote, ' has been extensively applied. 

 It is Kraepelin's method and the method of Burgerstein, Haser, 

 Kemsies, and many others. The form may vary widely; firstly, in the 

 character of the work required, which may be either a long series of 

 simple examples (v. Laser, Holmes, Eichter), or a few pieces of more 

 difficult work [v. Sikorsky, Friedrich, Kemsies); and secondly, in the 

 method of measuring fatigue, which may be either by the decrease in 

 the rapidity with which the work is done or by the increase in the 

 number of errors which occur. A test which has been called the " com- 

 bination method " was devised by Ebbinghaus, who used paragraphs 

 of text from which here and there words had been erased. The sub- 

 jects were required to fill in all the blanks, v/ithin a given time, with 

 words which made sense with the context. Measurement was by the 

 number of errors occurring. 



' The apparatus for all such mental tests is simple ; it requires only 

 the preparation of a set of arithmetical problems or the mutilating of 



' On the other hand, ovcr-preesure ■will show itself in its perniciovus effects 

 on health in general and in th« production of nervous or bovine dispositions. 

 See e.g. Hertel's Over-pressure, p. 33. 



