Emphasis has been put upon the prerequisite of symmetry in the development of the child. This demand does not predicate an initial symmetry to be preserved, but rather a symmetry to be attained. Asymmetry is a feature of early childhood. The task of the teacher is the cultivation of the child along asymmetrical lines to a symmetrical result. Success involves the study of the average structural and functional conditions of childhood at given periods, as well as a careful estimate of the degree of individual departure from this common standard.

A comparison of the structural conditions which obtain at birth is suggestive. In the new-born babe the nutritive organs show a percentage of body weight disproportionately great to that in the adult. The skeletal framework has reached and merely maintains its essential proportion. The muscular tissues represent only 23 per cent. of the weight of the young infant. They reach an average of 45 per cent. at maturity. The nerve tissues are relatively massive, representing from 13 to 15 per cent. of the body weight at birth, while they are wanting in that structural complexity and functional specialization which they attain, at the expense of bulk, in the adult, of whose total weight they bear but 2 per cent., or less.

The applications of this fact of physiologic asymmetry to the education of the child are manifold. The several strings in the human harp must be tuned and played upon in turn. They are of variant tensions and unequal lengths. Each must be developed in its fundamental quality or in its under- or its overtones of power until its pitch, variant from but relational to the rest, falls into place in the production of a harmonic composite. All the strings of function do not demand equal play. They do require exercise in turn. Alternation and brevity in their exercise are the elements of functional pleasure or interest. The whole gamut of activity, fitly touched, turns work into play at every point of contact and gives to recreative use the quality of rest. More, there is a tone-dominant in every human instrument which marks its individual quality, and which demands discovery by a master mind and cultivation by a master hand. But while the teacher discovers and cultivates, he does not create. Marchesi trains a throat and drills a tone to lingering sweetness, but never yet did a Marchesi make a voice. The child harp has its own specific vibrations, its own intrinsic hidden song. Strung to sympathy and tuned to response by the trainer's hand, life strikes at last its sympathetic chord and it sings itself. Again, every string cannot be played upon successfully by the same hand. Variance in exercise is not more important than variance in the exerciser. The grade teacher of today who is expected to serve as a mental acrobat in the teaching of a half a dozen topics for five days of every week and forty weeks of every year is an educational paradox in herself and a physiologic blunder in the education of the child. Specialism must go into the grades as it has partially gone

into the secondary and wholly into the university schools. The teacher as a factor in the development of childhood will be potentized in direct ratio to the number of the years in which she is permitted to pursue the training of a given child, as well as in direct proportion to the degree in which she specializes herself in its teaching.

But perhaps the most significant physiologic feature of childhood, and that upon the recognition of which the success of the child trainer most largely depends, is the fact of the relative immaturity of the nervous system. The nervous mechanism of the infant is of great but undeveloped bulk at birth. It is an unmapped chart. Its functional activity, so far, is limited almost to the exercise of those rhythmic reflexes which represent the small funded capital-the transmitted quality of a few nerve cells. The avenues of special sense which serve as the fields of instruction along which impressions pass to the awakenment, the direction, the development of the dormant nerve centers have been, until birth, but closed pathways. They are suddenly opened up to a flood of influences. At once the differentiation of nerve tissue, the specialization of nerve function, begins. Under the influence of newly-operative stimuli, the end organs are at first uncertain in their responses; they manifest an irregular irritability; at first the paths of conduction along which impressions and impulses are conveyed are poorly insulated, and a certain vagrancy of transmission is observed; at first the nerve cells display a degree of instability, of imperfect storage, of disorderly discharge of energy. Gradually the specific quality of receiving cells, the lines of resistance along nerve paths, the intelligent reaction of nerve centers, become established. The education of the nervous mechanism is rapid, but it is essentially post-natal, and, however rapid, it is a long process by which it is brought up to the point of average contemporary development.

This educational process affects the evolution of two distinct yet related phases of function-that upon the afferent or impressional side, and that upon the efferent or actional side of this nervous mechanism. Upon the one side is involved the evolution of the properties of specific sensation, or the power to develop specific impressions; of perception, or the power to recognize the causes of such impressions; of judgment, or the power to compare impressions with each other; and, finally, of registration, or the impress of given impressions upon the nervous mechanism, to the end that they may be reproduced, upon similar stimulation, in the form of memory. This progression of function upon the afferent or impressional side of the nervous mechanism is essentially a matter of edu cation. It involves the cultivation of all the avenues of special sense, and, in its highest results, the association of these several fields of instruction with each other.

The child trainer enjoys a large opportunity in the adaptation of the means of education to this great end. Certain primary principles must guide his task.

First, and perhaps of most important observance, the stimuli by which impressions are to be produced upon the nervous mechanism of the child should be self-chosen. So, and only so, can they be fitly graded to the degree of its development. Age is not an index to that development, and consequently it is not an intelligent means of school grading. More careful estimates of capacity should determine, from time to time, the classification of pupils.

Large opportunity should be provided for the child's voluntary comparison of stimuli to the education of his judgment. The application of given stimuli should be frequently repeated to the attainment of that permanent impress upon his nerve centers upon which registration or memory depends. Memory is a too contracted term which marks an undue limitation in the estimate of this registrative function. It is a trite saying that we forget far more than we remember. It were better said that we are unaware of how much we register. The field of unconscious registration is a wider one than that of conscious memory. Memory is but registration in act.

The more clearly cut in its character is a stimulus-that is, the more sharply contrasting it be upon the field of specific sensation-the more likely it is to produce a permanent impress. The teacher should study the mode of application of a stimulus or the method by which an object is brought under observation. The element of surprise is useful.

The invariable demand for what the physiologist terms reaction time in the development of an impression should be respected. Its duration varies in different individuals. The child who is said to be absent-minded is usually one in whom this reaction time is necessarily prolonged, or in whom it is occupied with a slow comparison of impressions, out of which sounder, safer judgments are born than are usually developed by a mind of readier response.

Stimuli are often employed in too rapid succession. Impressions crowd each other in the avenues of sight and sound and touch; they produce indefinite sensations or perceptions; they permit scant time for comparisons; they leave feeble impress at the best.

But that is not all. They intrude by their undue repetition upon the possibilities of education upon the other side of nerve function. They embarrass the actional result in which every nerve act completes its full cycle. The impression which does not have its counterpart in expression is in the end a bane rather than a benefit. The remarkable achievements which have been made in the teaching of the deaf or the blind are in part traceable to the fact that the teacher is compelled at every step to halt for the intelligent response of the pupil. A flood of impressions, flowing in fast upon the highly sensitized nerve cells of the child, and finding no outlet, becomes a physiologic burden upon the nervous mechanism, and in the end produces the overcharged, introspective, self-centered,

unkinetic type of which modern socicty affords so many examples, especially of the feminine order, in whom action or expression is habitually disastrously limited.

Fortunately, the motor element in education has been of more clearly recognized importance in recent days. It is still of too limited appreciation. Action takes form in the finer as well as the coarser movements of the muscular tissues. In physical exercise it is trained only upon a broad field. In pose, in gesture, in facial expression, in speech, in song, in all varieties of manual training, it has opportunities of the most delicate culture. And in this actional phase of nerve function we witness the same progression of development that we have already noted upon the impressional side. From the simple reflex response the human nervous mechanism rapidly proceeds to the exercise of the nerve centers and muscular tissues in relation and eventually in co-ordinated harmony of result. Next, the co-ordinated act becomes habit the acquired reflex- and habit gradually merges into those repetitional effects which determine structural impress and which fund themselves in those rhythmical reflexes which are exhibited in hereditary or instinctive acts.

The educator should note and foster this progression. It should be one of his continual aims to develop harmony of action, to make co-ordination habitual, to encourage habit to serve for the creation of a larger fund of hereditary capacity in the motor cells.

He should observe another foundational fact—that in their nature all forms of motor expression are rhythmic. Rhythm is the rule of function. It is simply another evidence of the physical fact, exalted into a physiologic law, that all matter, and especially all living matter, is susceptible of vibratory motion. Vibration is the essence of rhythm, of that rhythmic swing, of that rise and fall of functional activity, which, now within narrow range and again upon a broader plane, every organ of the animal body exhibits.

This rhythmic quality is a feature of all forms of motor expression. "Muscular movement," says Wilks, "is essentially rhythmic." "All movement," says Clifford Allbutt, "even the rush of falling water, is rhythmic." Roy observes that upon using a pencil to form a series of dots upon the surface of a sheet of paper, while the paper is drawn slowly along from right to left, a uniform number of dots per second is made.

Wallaschek tells us that "not in the different passions of the mind, but in muscular action, music appears to have had its origin." Allbutt again says: "The Greek strophe and antistrophe, the basis of rhythm (in music) — terms now applied to musical phrasing—were primarily dependent upon the movement, the dancing, of the orchestra from one side to another."

If musical rhythm, then, has originated in muscular movement, it follows that muscular movement itself, inspired by a nervous mechanism

which pulsates in the discharge of rhythmic waves of energy, is essentially rhythmic. The regulation of that rhythm is part of the work of the educator. To cultivate its highest expressions, to vary its exercise, to change its measure, is to afford pleasure in work and rest in recreation.

Finally, the study of the physiology of childhood in its applications to methods of education must take account of the fundamental distinctions of sex. These differences are inalienable and are alike structural and functional. They are emphasized in the nervous mechanism of the child. The common view that these differences do not antedate puberty, that they are not to be recognized and need not be respected from infancy up, is believed to be a physiologic error. The writer has determined, in a long series of cases, the sex differences in heart-beat, in respiration, in digestive capacity, in emotional quality, in physical measurements, and in the limits of muscular and nerve power ranging from birth to puberty.

George Eliot's definition of woman as "morally superior, physically finer, and intellectually different" is inherently and originally and ineradicably true. Modifications of these differences may appear, but the types persist. They afford a basis for distinctive training, even within the coeducational limits of the public school. Education must still

leave room for the characteristics of sex or it will be in the end deformative. Boy and girl may sit side by side and learn the same lesson, and yet be differently educated. Each should be taught what each instinctively knows - the fact of difference. Each should be taught to recognize that difference as the most sacred fact of each human life. The evolution of each sex must proceed along its own lines. The more sensitive organism of the girl makes her demand for physiologic consideration the more urgent. The dominant part which she plays in the evolution of the race makes the elevation of her type of largest consequence. As Lester Ward puts it, "woman is the unchanging trunk in the genealogic tree." Those educational methods must fail of their possibilities which do not take large account of the eternally feminine in nature, which tends, in the process of evolution, to its own inevitable and inevitably beautiful result.

DISCUSSION

E. A. KIRKPATRICK, professor of psychology and child study, State Normal School, Fitchburg, Mass.-Much of what Professor Beard has said is not only unquestionably true, but so well stated that it is unnecessary for me to repeat, and unwise for me to attempt to restate. My time may be best spent in discussing points of difference, and in elaborating ideas which Dr. Beard had time merely to suggest.

I take exception, first, to the statement that child study has been pursued almost exclusively from the metaphysical standpoint, if by child study is meant what is now known by that term. The child study which is sometimes said to have been carried on by all educators from earliest times may have been of that kind, but certainly this is not true of the child study of the last decade. I am quite sure that of the list of books and articles