Kemp.—On the Medical Aspects of Education. xxxiii 
capacity and turn of mind in different learners. There are many minds 
of neutral tendency—minds that can take in a certain limited amount of 
knowledge on almost any and every subject, but which ean never master 
much in anything. These minds, if they be not unduly pressed or flattened 
down, become in time moderate in learning, and sometimes imbued with the 
plainest common sense. They bear at school much work with comparatively 
small injury, for they are known to be dull, and great things are not 
expected of them nor attempted by them. They do the necessary work of 
mediocrity—in this world a most important work. There are two other 
very different orders of minds. There is the mind analytical—that looks 
into details in business, into elements in science, into figures and 
facts in civil and natural history. In the school such a mind is 
good at mathematics—good at facts and dates, good at niceties of lan- 
guage. In these directions its lessons are pleasures, or, at most, scarcely 
labours. There is, again, the mind constructive or synthetic—the mind 
which builds ; which uses facts and figures only, in the end for its own 
purposes of work; which easily learns principles of construction; which 
grasps poetry and the hidden meaning of the poet; which is ended 
in its power of keeping knowledge as a whole, and which cannot take 
fast hold of minute distinctions. In the small school of the youth, as in 
the great school of the world, these two orders of minds are ever present. 
The mistake is, that they are so commonly confounded, and that no change 
is made in the mode of study to suit the genius of the one or the other. 
The consequence is, that lessons are given to these two classes of minds : 
which neither can master. Under these conditions, both chafe and get 
weary, and still do not get on. Then they fall into bad health, grow fretful 
and feverish, are punished, and otherwise made unhappy and morose. And 
so, if they be unduly forced, they grow up unhealthy in body and mind, 
feeling that the occupations into which they have drifted are uncongenial to 
them, for they know that they have not mental power necessary to carry 
them on successfully.” 
Without going at any length into the order of the gradual expansion and 
invigoration of the mental powers, I cannot pass the subject by without 
giving a ‘word of warning, especially to parents. The formation of associa- 
tions takes place with great ease and rapidity during the earliest period of 
childhood ; and these exercise so much influence over the succession of the 
thoughts and the disposition of a child during the whole remainder of life, 
that the “force of early associations" has become proverbial. It may be 
granted that the state of feeling which is habitual to each individual may 
depend in great measure upon his peculiar constitution, yet it is unques- 
tionable, that his disposition, thoughts, and feelings, are largely influenced 
