READ AT THE SIXTY-FIFTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF INSTRUCTION, JULY 9, 1895. FROM Journal of Proceedings of the American Institute of Instruction, 1895.

THE RELATION OF MANUAL TRAINING TO

CERTAIN MENTAL DEFECTS.

THE full title of my paper is: Manual training as an agent in the diagnosis and treatment of certain mental defects; but that statement exaggerates its importance, since what I shall have to say on the subject is merely in the nature of suggestion and inquiry. I have, in fact, no results to announce; no formed conclusions, even, to express. My mind has been drawn within the last few years to certain phenomena which appear to intimate the probability, first, that mental defects, seriously interfering with progress in study and with success in the affairs of life, may exist without being suspected by parents, teachers, or play- and school-mates; secondly, that such defects do in fact exist far more frequently than is popularly supposed. Brought to these conclusions, it has seemed to me that manual training, or the practice of the mechanic arts as a means of instruction,—while useful in the case of students of normal minds and of the best abilities, may have an additional and most important use as an agent, first for discovering and then for treating, these defects. Let me ask your attention, somewhat at length, to incidents which have suggested the probability that parent and teacher and play- or school-mate have often to do with wholly unsuspected defects of mental constitution and organization.

A few years ago man of a committee to examine candidates for West Point, in one of the congressional districts of Massachusetts. The thirteen candidates were subjected to the usual examination for physical soundness; and all satisfactorily passed the test. When we came, however, to the test for color-blindness, a young man whom I had remarked as one of the most spirited, intelligent, and finelooking of the group, advanced to the table and threw the skeins of colored worsteds into groups so absurd as to seem actually impossible. One moment sufficed to show that he was wholly out of the competition and entirely ineligible for military service. Here was a young man, evidently of more than usual intelligence and ability, who had gone to the age of seventeen or eighteen without any suspicion on his own part that he had not the normal sense respecting color. His parents and the other members of his family from childhood had been accustomed to observe him in his dealings inside the house with colored objects; his playmates had doubtless on countless occasions made reference to the color of objects; and yet he had gone through all this, day after day and year after year, without having his suspicion excited that what they saw he did not see, and he had taken the trouble to prepare himself for an examination the results of which might affect his whole life, without the faintest apprehension of his disability. I remember to have heard of a naval officer who went through the war and was afterwards discharged from the service for a

I was called upon to act as the chair

long-unsuspected color-blindness which was almost total; yet for years he had been dealing with color signals and colored flags and ensigns. It is well known that the color tests introduced by boards of railroad commissioners in several States have resulted in throwing out not a few locomotive engineers of large experience who had never discovered or suspected their deficiencies.

Take another instance: a gentleman came to my office to introduce his son as an applicant for admission to the Institute of Technology. The young man had received an appointment to the Naval Academy at Annapolis; had passed the text-book examination; had passed the ordinary physical examination; had gone through the test for color-blindness; and then it was found that an object which he could see distinctly with one eye at the distance of twenty-seven feet had to be brought within eight feet to be seen at all with the other eye. During all his childhood and boyhood he had never for a moment suspected the existence of this defect. Let me recite still another case. A lady of my acquaintance had very charitably taken into her household, as a servant, a young woman who was subject to severe nervous disorder. She could get employment under no ordinary circumstances; and the lady I refer to had undertaken to carry a part of her burden by employing her. After the lapse of some weeks, this lady, who had often observed the servant very closely and curiously when engaged at her work, especially while sewing, broke out with an exclamation, "Jane, do you really see any

thing?" The girl looked up in great surprise. "Why, yes, I see perfectly well." Her mistress rejoined, "I do not believe that you see anything as we see it." An examination by an oculist followed; and it was ascertained that the girl's entire disorder proceeded from eyes that were simply a mass of defects and distortions. With treatment of her eyes, the nervous affection in time ceased. I related this to one of the most distinguished medical men in New York, for many years a professor in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, who rejoined: "There are many such cases. My son, a captain in the United States army, for years suffered the greatest agony from pains in his head and the back of his neck, before he discovered that the whole trouble was due to defects of vision."

I might go on for a long time enumerating similar instances which have come under my observation; but what has been said will suffice to justify the inquiry, whether, if such defects, in such degrees, can exist in respect to matters so objective and so completely open to observation and to examination, it is not probable that defects of mental constitution and organization, of the gravest nature, are found in every schoolroom and in every large family; and that much of what the parent or the teacher takes to be the result of indifference, willfulness, or neglect, is due to mental distortions, perversions, obliquities, lesions, and breaches of continuity, which have as distinct and decided an effect in preventing the proper and normal action of the child's mind upon what