XXIV Appendix. 



The aptitude and great desire for learning which children who are physi- 

 cally weak often show, is a matter of every-day experience ; and, doubtless, 

 most of you can call to mind cases of deformed and sickly children, in whom 

 the mental powers are greatly in advance of their years. Such cases fre- 

 quently come under the notice of the medical man, and it is often only by 

 his timely interference that serious harm is averted, by the child being 

 ]Dlaced under influences suited to the proper maintenance and development 

 of his physical system. When the child, at the age of from seven to 

 ten, — unfortunately for itself — begins to show signs of undue quickness and 

 power of learning, it is from this starting-point, I think, that mental train- 

 ing first begins to be at variance with physical health. Up to this time, 

 perhaps, the child may have been living under influences which paid due 

 regard to its bodily health — taking its proper amount of rest and play — 

 until it is suddenly found out by the parent or teacher that there is mental 

 soil that only requires careful attention and cultivation to make it, as they 

 think, bring forth an abundant intellectual harvest ! What is the process 

 of cultivation that begins ? The hom'S of work — which untU now have 

 been just enough to give the developing brain its necessary exercise — are 

 increased ; the child is stimulated to fresh mental efforts by being promised 

 some taking prize or play, which are made to be a kind of set-off against 

 work ; the work itself probably is changed ; from having been, up to this 

 time, that in which the child took some degree of interest, it now becomes 

 dull and uninteresting — perhaps the learning of Latin and Greek verbs 

 (which, I need hardly say, has nothing to commend itself to the mind of a 

 child of seven or eight years of age). The worst part of this training is, 

 that the imposed work is actually done ; and as the brain is very active 

 because it is diverted from its natural course, the child it belongs to may 

 become so unusually precocious as to be unnatural in its cleverness. 



Dr. Eichardson, an able advocate for physical training, when speaking 

 of unusually clever, precocious children who are being pressed into learn- 

 ing, draws so faithful a pictm-e of such a child that I will quote his own 

 words : — "Let us look," he says, "at the inside of this marvellous picture, 

 as a skilled eye can easily look, and understand too. These precocious, 

 coached-up children are never well ; their mental excitement keeps up a 

 flush, which, like the excitement caused by strong diink in older children, 

 seems like health, but is not. If you look at the tongues of these children 

 you see them to be furred, or covered with many red pomts like a straw- 

 berry, or to be too red and very dry. If you inquire into the state of the 

 appetite, you find that it is capricious, that all kinds of strange foods are 

 asked for, and that the stomach is constantly out of order. If you watch 

 the face for long, you will find that the frequent flush gives way to an un- 



