Some day, probably, laboratories of child study and educational hygiene will be a regular feature of every large public-school system in America. Indeed, the school board of Chicago has, since 1899, maintained an official Department of Child Study and Pedagogic Investigation, under the direction of Drs. Christopher, Smedley, Bruner, and Macmillan. New York City and the Russell Sage Foundation have each created a Department of Child Hygiene. Medical inspection of schools has extended into hundreds of American cities.

All these facts declare the trend toward a more universal diagnosis of the health and educational needs of individual children. This is the logical outcome of the scientific study of the child. It is the natural outcome of the scientific interpretation of life. Such interpretation reveals the laws of life and develops a new conscience toward these laws. The end-result will be a revolution of the work of the schools, because the traditions and inherited organization of the schools contain no true conscience as to health.

The traditional mission of the schools has been the transmission of culture, the imparting of skill and information. The new biological temper, which is the product of modern science, exalts hygiene and makes health the central solicitude in all the work of education. How recent is this new attitude of the school is brought home to us by Dr. Ayres: "Eleven years ago the school superintendents of America, assembled in convention in Chicago, discussed the problems then foremost in educational thought and action. Diligent search through the printed report of that meeting disclosed no single mention of child health, no word about school hygiene, no address devoted to the conservation or development of the physical vigor of youth. At that time eight cities in America had systems of medical inspection in their

public schools. To-day the number of such systems is over four hundred. This development is without parallel in the history of education.”

The new changes in education have been directed chiefly toward the care of backward, defective, and delinquent children, but incidentally the normal child is being benefited in untold ways. And he will reap the large benefit in the future. The new biological temper in education is also normalizing and training our humanitarianism. Through science, humanitarianism is losing some of its sentimental tears and romantic miscarriages, and changing into a more robust attitude of justice and protection, protection of the health and vigor of normal children. Historically, Child Hygiene, yesterday only a phrase, but already becoming a program for action, is a phase or an outgrowth of the scientific study of the child.

The child-study movement has grown to be so complex that a notable effort was recently made to bring its many phases into closer relationship. In July, 1909, there was held at Clark University a series of conferences which, in the light of the history we have sketched from prescientific times to the present, takes on considerable interest and significance. At these conferences were gathered leading representatives of the following interests: day nurseries, kindergartens, child psychology, medical education of defectives and subnormal children, open-air schools, tuberculosis in children, eugenic movements, psychological clinics, school nurses and physicians, settlement work for children, boys' clubs, Sunday school, industrial training, child labor, story-telling league, children's theater, playground movement, children's libraries, dancing and music, the juvenile court. It was a general child-welfare congress. A children's institute was founded, which will be a repository for

information and a disseminating center of service, correlating the scientific studies of children with practical methods for advancing their physical, mental, and moral well-being. Experts and practical laymen, psychologists and social workers, were all present to learn from each other and to help each other. They gathered with a focal interest in the child. It was a blending of the two great forces which have been accumulating volume down the centuries and are now coming consciously to the rescue of the child, — Humanitarianism and Science.

PART TWO

THE GENETIC BACKGROUND

CHAPTER IV

THE BIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

The child is situated between two vistas, one of which reaches into the remote past, the other into the pregnant future. Sometimes teachers are not conscious of either vista, and this is shortness of sight. It takes a combined seer and prophet to see clearly in both directions, and the teacher should be as much of each as possible. The reason why so much of the school's activity is petty, or seems petty, is because the teachers are themselves petty-visioned. The present in the individual, in the race, and in society is but a stage of evolution, which can be understood only in terms of the past. The child is not a static thing which mere logic, however sharp, can by analysis dissect and thus explain. Childhood is all recapitulation, nascency, and growth. The child has a pedigree, both human and biological, and to appreciate him we must think historically.

This means that we must unclamp the chronological imagination and give it freedom to roam back even beyond the days of Moses and the Pharaohs. Our forefathers were very parsimonious with their chronology, and a Cambridge University scholar in the seventeenth century, after an exhaustive study, specifically limited the imagination to

4004 B.C., October 23, 9 A.M. (the pedagogue is apt to think, perhaps, that everything worth while begins at about 9 A.M.). But this is the age of evolution, when a millennium in nature's history is considered but the winking of an eye.

Haeckel, by an ingenious condensation, makes the vastness of geological epochs comprehensible. Allowing one hundred million years for the age of life on our globe, and calling this immense period a solar day, the span of time since Moses becomes less than five seconds. G. Stanley Hall, in a recent article, has argued that it is "more scientific, surer, and psychologically better to assume and to think in vast units of time, not merely to indulge the momentum of evolutionary thought but as an aid to clearer insight and to larger views of the universe." "The visible universe is one of countless forms which its substance and energy have taken on, and the oldest objects in any corner of it are novelties to a mind vast and ancient enough to grasp the larger history of its eternal flux."

In the immeasurable beginning, when the earth was without form and void, there may have been a time when the very chemical elements, some eighty in number, which are at the basis of the material universe, were nonexistent, when they, like man, were but possibilities. The transformations of radium suggest how in the æons the distinctive molecules may have been formed by variation in number and arrangement of primitive electrons. G. Stanley Hall, after reviewing the new conceptions of matter and energy, and marshaling many impressive examples of the lifelike qualities of glass, iron, mercury, colloids, crystals, and other inanimate substances, concludes that "the world in its inorganic phases is perhaps more vividly active than life itself. The secrets of the origin of the soul are now more