the days when a man could mercilessly beat his wife, his beast, and his child, without a challenge; when orphans, idiots, and strays were herded into bleak workhouses, and when schools were "nurseries of vice," commonly presided over by "incapable pettifoggers or sordid, brutal men to

whom few considerate persons would have intrusted a dog." Oliver Twist, Dotheboys Hall, Squeers, Nicholas Nickleby, Child Queller, and Choakumchild are names that bring a flood of associations true to actual conditions. "The pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men," that stalk through

Dickens's stories, were not merely the product of artistic imagination; nor were the schools "where every kindly sympathy and affection was blasted in its birth and every young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down." The real truth is that the doctrine of child depravity still lingered as a dominant Christian ideal. Repression and corporal punishment were the rules. The greater mildness in methods of training and the very existence of many childwelfare organizations to-day are traceable to that eloquent champion of children's rights, Charles Dickens.

At the centennial year of Dickens's birth it is interesting to recall such large expressions of the humanitarian attitude toward children as the Child Welfare Exhibit, held first at New York and recently, on a bigger scale, in Chicago. Hundreds of thousands of people in each city visited this unique exposition, with its army of "explainers" and its wealth of photographs, statistics, headline statements, and living demonstrations setting forth the conditions of city child life. Nothing could have been more significant of the greater solicitude for children, with which we associate the name of Dickens, than these remarkable and inspiring exhibits.

Humanitarianism is becoming part of the spirit of the race. One has but to glance through the directory of the charities of a large city to be convinced of this. While societies for the prevention of cruelty to children are still a necessity, deliberate and brutal forms of cruelty belong more to the past than to the present; but the unwitting cruelty of indifference and ignorance was perhaps never so extensive as right now. This, Science alone can dispel, by the enlightenment of the masses and by the cultivation of experts.

CHAPTER II

THE SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION OF LIFE

The fuller appreciation of childhood to-day has by no means been due to the growth of the humanitarian spirit alone. The other great factor has been the development of modern science. The present splendid, growing body of scientific knowledge about life represents the most important achievement of the race.

With the end of the classic civilization, science, broadly speaking, came to a standstill and remained so for centuries. This is particularly true of the sciences concerned with the body and the mind of man, and therefore of the child. There was no scientific interpretation of life. All discussions on this vital central theme were carried on by the fruitless method of scholastic philosophy, and were never based on first-hand inquiry. Such inquiry into facts over which God had, it was said, purposely placed a mantle of mystery, was frowned upon as being unpious and prying curiosity. The medicine, physiology, and psychology of the medieval period, therefore, were a mixture of error and fancy, except where the authorities whom the scholars were constantly quoting happened to be right.

Chief among these authorities were Galen and Aristotle, exponents of a former scientific culture. Even Aristotle, the greatest of the Greek intellects, was not always a safe guide. He thought that the soul pervaded the whole body, and had no idea of the nature and use of the nervous system, believing that the brain was a refrigerating apparatus to cool the

passions that arose in the heart. Galen thought that the blood, by an oscillatory motion, reached the brain, where it was elaborated into animal spirits, which were conveyed by tubular nerves throughout the body to impart motion, etc. This belief in humors, spirits, and sympathies persisted as a source of confusion down into the nineteenth century. Burton, in his quaint work "The Anatomy of Melancholy," calls spirit a most subtle vapor which is expressed from the blood, and the instrument of the soul to perform all his actions." A few other sample views follow: The optic nerve is a tube through which visual spirits pass, carrying ideas from the air and idola from objects to the brain; the liver is the seat of love, and the spleen of wit; the brain increases and decreases with the phases of the moon; sensation and motion are in the first ventricle, imagination and cogitation in the third ventricle.

Medicine, which like pedagogy depends upon a solid foundation of science, was discouraged. Drugs and sanitation were actually opposed. Because sickness was thought to be due to evil spirits, healing was performed by miracles, fetishes, charms, relics, amulets, potions, exorcisms, royal touch, and by tortura insomniae. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were tortured for being the instruments of Satan. We are now certain that they were not under the influence of witches or Satanic imps, but simply suffering from diseases of the nervous system. But with a systematized resistance to the investigation of the nervous system, Nature snugly concealed her facts and laws from the eyes of sinful man. The most elementary facts about the child as a psychophysical mechanism simply were not understood or were misunderstood. Theological conceptions such as the doctrine of child depravity took the place of scientific interpretation. Man did not even know how many

ribs he had, because theological interpretation was preferred to the testimony of eye and hand.

With the age of geographical discovery was ushered in a spirit of scientific discovery. Both partake of a similar impulse, man's adventurous daring to penetrate the

unknown.

One of the greatest of the pioneers of discovery was the impetuous, forceful Belgian, Vesalius, the father of modern anatomy. In the face of conservatism, prejudice, and actual persecution, he abandoned the venerable charts of Galen and went straight to the facts of nature.

The original of the accompanying portrait of Vesalius, now in Cornell University, is eloquently described by Andrew D. White in his "History of the Warfare of Science with Theology":"By the magic of Hamann's pencil Vesalius again stands on earth, and we look once more into his cell. Its windows and doors, bolted and barred within, betoken the storm of bigotry which rages without; the crucifix, toward which he turns his eyes, symbolizes the spirit in which he labors; the corpse of the plague stricken beneath his hand ceases to be repulsive; his very soul seems to send forth rays from the canvas, which strengthen us for the good fight in this age."

Dissection of the body had for centuries been frowned upon as impious, but Vesalius haunted gibbets and charnel houses" so that he might secure material for his classic work

De corporis humani fabrica." This great, "sincere book," beautifully illustrated with accurate drawings, laid the foundation of modern biological science. Locy says, "It is more than a landmark in the progress of science; it created an epoch." In the spirit of modern science he performed experiments on living structures to determine their function. This method of experimental observation, which Harvey