54 Education and Innervation. 



powers, qualities, and characters, and the nervous system, or 

 going to the root of the matter between education and 

 innervation. 



Let us consider the physical training which is necessary 

 to promote the most favourable conditions under which these 

 may be developed to the greatest perfection. One of the 

 most flagrant vices of modern education is the abnormal 

 development of the mental faculties to the exclusion of physical 

 training, and, I think, a few moments consideration cannot 

 fail to convince us of the great danger which we are incurring 

 under this head, and how there is a possibility of our hand- 

 ing down a generation physically inferior to ourselves and 

 immensely so to our predecessors. Not that I would advocate 

 a lessening of mental culture, but with the cultivation of the 

 mind, the proper culture of the body also, so that there may be 

 in our children a " Mens sana in corpore sano." That this 

 warning is not unnecessary I will give you, in support of what 

 I have said, the substance of the remarks of an eminent scientist, 

 Dr. Crichton Browne, on this point. In writing to " The 

 Times " in reference to the appearance of some lady students, 

 Girton girls, whom he saw waiting at a roadside station, he 

 remarked on the contracted chests, high shoulders, spectacled 

 noseS; and hardened features of these young ladies, and warned 

 the readers of that journal that excessive study might seriously 

 detract from that personal beauty and attractiveness for which 

 English girls were famous. Moreover, it was also pointed out 

 that, as the consequences of excessive study unmixed with a 

 proper amount of physical training were so serious, young ladies 

 should hesitate seriously before they ran the risk of losing those 

 charms which rendered them so attractive to the other sex. 

 Now such a disaster is largely due to the fatal ignorance of what 

 is needful for the development of the body, and to a careless 

 disregard for the physical culture of the young. To go back 

 to the source of this ignorance, and hence to the cause of much 

 irreparable mischief that is produced in the constitutions of our 

 children, how many young people, who undertake the responsi- 



