b TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



great variety of knowledge and impressions. This invasion 

 progresses with such rapidity that almost every child is regarded 

 by its parents and those about it as being precocious, simply 

 because they observe how quickly the understanding, the powers 

 of attention and at last those of speaking, of memorising and of 

 reading and writing, in fact all the powers of reception and of 

 representation, become acquired. The child's chatter, its 

 imagination and faculty for romance are all the outcome of its 

 rapidly developing intelligence, through the medium of which 

 knowledge becomes distributed to the various centres whose 

 functions come to be unified and co-ordinated, and to work 

 harmoniously together. 



This co-relation of function is so essential for the effective- 

 ness of education that I trust you will pardon me for saying a 

 few words concerning it, by way of emphasising its importance, 

 even although I reiterate some old and well-known facts. 

 Many of the diseases of the invalid child which interfere with its 

 education involve an upsetting of the balance of the normal 

 co-relations of function, and we can learn a great deal about 

 co-ordination by observing these effects of its disorders. The 

 quality of a child's intelligence often appears to become 

 depreciated when it is suffering from a chronic disease, and we 

 frequently note how greatly it improves when the disease itself 

 is attended to. The education of the child and of its cerebral 

 centres is under these circumstances interfered with, not 

 necessarily because its intelligence or capacity for knowing is 

 actually deficient, but through the mental or nervous deviation 

 which is brought about by the disease from which it may be 

 suffering, and the releasing of this energy no doubt leads to a 

 restoration of the nervous balance and enables the intelligence 

 to resume its normal distributive functions, the intelligence 

 being essential for the proper teaching of some of the various 

 centres which co-operate one with another. We all know that 

 people with low types of intelligence are only fitted for the lower 



