262 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
What is there in this comparatively immense expenditure of time and 
energy upon Latin that will develop organs and functions continuously 
available for the boy’s mental efficiency and usefulness in the world? 
How does a nervous mechanism, with its infinitely complex system of 
neurones and connecting fibers, fashioned through and for the study 
of the Latin language, become adapted for all other mental processes ? 
In short, it is time to read a new and compelling significance into the 
old query of instinctive common sense as to what is the value of the 
so-called culture that is doled out to our children in the secondary 
schools and colleges. 
Having thus answered the first question involved in our proposition, 
it remains to consider the further question of what becomes of useless 
organs of culture. What is the effect upon the girl’s life of having to 
support an elaborate nervous mechanism for dealing with mathematical 
symbols and concepts which she never has occasion to use? What is 
the effect upon the boy’s life of having to support a nervous mechanism 
for declining Latin nouns and adjectives, conjugating Latin verbs, and 
construing Latin sentences, which he never has occasion to use? May 
not these unused nervous organs become parasitic upon the nervous 
vitality, just as the unused muscles of the athlete become parasitic 
upon the general organic vitality? It may seem to some little less 
than fantastic to suggest such a result. And yet, if we believe that 
life is a biological unit, and that the laws controlling it are identical in 
nature and operation, there is no escaping this conclusion. Moreover, 
there are many peculiarities in the nervous and psychic constitutions 
of a considerable number of educated men and women that await a 
plausible theory to account for them. The suspicion is harbored in 
many minds that academic communities are apt to become over-cultured. 
They are apt to lose that balance between perceptual and conceptual 
experience which is the supreme test of healthy-mindedness. At the 
very best, they suffer from an hypertrophy of the critical faculties, 
which reveals itself in philosophical and linguistic hair-splitting. At 
the worst, it may amount to a nervous tension and general intellectual 
straining after precision in scholarship and propriety in conduct that 
creates an atmosphere blighting to spontaneity of work and life in the 
students. This is frequently illustrated in schools and colleges for 
girls, where an excess of women teachers, with hypertrophied intellects 
and atrophied human interests, make education a process of mental 
arrest and disease instead of growth. 
Outside of academic communities, there are to be found everywhere 
a cultured flotsam and jetsam. Europe has long had its proletariat of 
culture, and America is rapidly developing one. In the more intense 
nervous life of America, moreover, there are appearing numerous types 
of nervous instability among educated men and women. This is illus- 
trated not only in the frequent neurasthenia of the cultured classes. It 
