a balance, and the existence of institutional obstinacy is a hopeful sign that she has not given even the wards of prisons, schools, and asylums a ruinous proportion of docility.

VI. Work. There is a kind of stubbornness which stands for persistence in a purpose or cause, and this kind should be sharply differentiated from inhibitory obstinacy. This persistency really is an expression of the instinct of work rather than of relaxation. Throughout a venerable prehistory man was schooled in the lesson of diligence. In most primitive times his impulses of workmanship resulted in merely desultory activity, but with the schooling of centuries this activity became more and more consecutive and purposive. Workmanship alone cannot account for man's progress. Upon this instinct was built another which may be called the instinct of perseverance, not only doing something, but persisting until the thing is done.

There can be no doubt that this instinct of perseverance, or consecutiveness, has been accumulating; that it was much greater at the close of the paleolithic period than during the eolithic, and that in the metal ages it was stronger still. In this instinctive persistence we must look for the root of all the heroic labor of man and his patient vigils, of all his ambition, strenuousness, and the terrific pace of modern life, the sedulousness and the application which the schools have been nourishing for centuries. Workmanship and perseverance are to each other like play and work.

The legion of instincts which we have reviewed represent the deepest requirements and tendencies of the race, traits so fundamental that they are transmitted from generation to generation, ingrained in the very structure of the nervous system. Most of these traits are geologic in their venerability. Childhood play, which involves so many instincts, is like a processional in which the prehuman and

human past reappears with the ripening of successive nerve centers. Nothing, therefore, reflects so well as spontaneous play the child's interests, if by that term we mean his own requirements and tendencies. The evolution of behavior in the race cannot be explained by intellectual progress. All development, both in the child and in the race, is grounded in instinct. The pedagogical principle based on this conception is stated in unequivocal words by Dr. Dewey: "The primary root of all educational activity is in the instinctive, impulsive attitudes of the child, and not in the presentation and application of external material." The teacher who ignores this principle must hear the parable of the house built on the sands.

All happiness and health depend, both in childhood and maturity, upon the adequate expression of instincts. There is hardly an instinct which must be absolutely repressed. Perfection and poise are the fruit not of suppression, but of a proper harmonizing of all the instincts. The problem of pedagogy is to give each instinct the fling it needs in childhood; the problem of the larger hygiene is to strike the proper balance between the instincts of activity and relaxation. Dr. Burnham has stated the aim of education to be the development of habits of healthful activity. No activity can be ideally healthful which does not have a maximum efficiency, and it cannot have this maximum unless it is generously offset by leisure. Here curriculums and life make their greatest errors. It is high time that the schools should appreciate the existence and worth of the benevolent, conserving instincts of leisure. To use a Hibernicism, leisure must itself be considered a healthful form of activity. Application does not need to be reënforced so much as counterpoised. We must learn and teach the art of leisure. Real growth and sanity demand relaxation in all its degrees,

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slumber, cat nap, lounge, loaf, and listlessness. It cannot be doubted that the hygienic distribution of periods of rest and activity would enormously increase the sweetness and ductiveness of mankind. Poets have vied with each other in their praises of sleep, the "sweet restorer." Science is indorsing their sonnets. Sleep is indeed the "dear mother of fresh thought and joyous health.”

This is the gospel of relaxation, and if it is biologically true, schools should obey it and build upon the instincts of relaxation habits of healthful rest.

CHAPTER VII

THE HAND OF THE RACE AND OF THE CHILD

About seventy-five years ago, when the Bridgewater Treatises were being written to prove the power, wisdom, and goodness of God as manifested in creation, Sir Charles Bell, in speaking of the human hand, said: "It presents the last and best proof in the order of creation of that principle of adaptation which evinces design. It is the consummation of all perfection." Anaxagoras entertained the opinion that the superiority of man was owing to his hand, but with this view the reverent Sir Charles Bell takes issue. "We rather say, with Galen, that man has hands given to him because he is the wisest of creatures, than to ascribe his superiority and knowledge to the use of his hands." Dr. Robert MacDougall, writing from the modern genetic standpoint, says: ". . . of all bodily members the hand is the most human and the most noble. In its features and capabilities is symbolized all that man has achieved in his long upward march from the primeval ooze.”

The early worm dwellers in this ooze possessed not even the rudiment of a hand, but the primitive fish who descended from them in all probability had a pair of fin folds extending laterally from head to tail in the form of continuous pleats in the skin. These skin folds were the forerunners of separate pairs of pectoral and pelvic fins, variously provided with cartilaginous rays, horny fibers, and bony rods. And these single-jointed paddles in turn were the forerunners of the many-jointed systems of levers of the later

quadrupeds. The large fact of descent is admitted, but the details of the transformation are not known. "We do not know," says Wiedersheim in his "Comparative Anatomy," "how the pentadactyl limb of an air-breathing vertebrate, adapted for progression upon land, has been derived from the fin only fitted for use in the water, and paleontology has so far furnished no solution to this problem." The significant fact is that the fore limbs and hind limbs of all vertebrates above the fishes conform to a single ground type.

The hand of the race is the terminal organ of the fore limb. Typically, it consists of a group of wrist and palmar bones attached to the radius and ulna, and five digits. Even in the amphibia the basal plan of the hand is highly analogous to that of the human. But the amphibian hand is webbed and adapted only to the humblest uses. In the reptiles the hand remains limited chiefly to the function of locomotion, though in the prehistoric pterosauria the fifth finger was elongated and supported a winglike attachment for flying. In most snakes the extremities have practically vanished. In birds the fore limbs are transformed, but not beyond recognition, for the digits and sometimes even the claws persist in the wings, as in the archæopteryx and a few existing species.

In mammals the anterior extremity comes to serve almost every possible use. In the whale the digits form the frame of a finlike paddle. "Place drawings of the skeleton of the human hand and the fin of a whale side by side and ordinary observers will require the printed names underneath to distinguish them." In the bat the digits are produced into long supports for a winged membrane for flying. In the horse the third digit is specialized into a hard, rigid hoof for swift running. The paleontological ancestor of the horse, a little plantigrade creature about