creation--as it is a good guide to the
infant--as it is a good guide to the invalid--as it is a good guide to
the differently-placed races of man--and as it is a good guide for every
adult who leads a healthful life, it may safely be inferred that it is a
good guide to childhood. It would be strange indeed were it here alone
untrustworthy.

With clothing, as with food, the usual tendency is towards an improper
scantiness. Here, too, asceticism creeps out. Yet it is not obedience to
the sensations, but disobedience to them which is the habitual cause of
bodily evils. It is not the eating when hungry, but the eating in the
absence of hunger, which is bad; it is not drinking when thirsty, but
continuing to drink when thirst has ceased, that is the vice.

Again, harm does not result from taking that active exercise which, as
every child shows us, nature strongly prompts, but from a persistent
disregard of nature's promptings; but the natural spontaneous exercise
having been forbidden, and the bad consequences of no exercise having
become conspicuous, there has been adopted a system of factitious
exercise--gymnastics. That this is better than nothing we admit; but
that it is an adequate substitute for play we deny. The truth is that
happiness is the most powerful of tonics. By accelerating the
circulation of the blood, it facilitates the performance of every
function; and so tends alike to increase health where it exists, and to
restore it when it has been lost. Hence the intrinsic superiority of
play to gymnastics. The extreme interest felt by children in their
games, and the riotous glee with which they carry on their rougher
frolics, are of as much importance as the accompanying exertion; and as
not supplying these mental stimuli gymnastics must be radically
defective, and can never serve in place of the exercises prompted by
nature. For girls as well as boys the sportive activities to which the
instincts impel are essential to bodily welfare. Whoever forbids them,
forbids the divinely-appointed means to physical development.

We suffer at present from a very potent detrimental influence, which is
excess of mental application, forgetting that nature is a strict
accountant, and if you demand of her in one direction more than she is
prepared to lay out, she balances the account by making a reduction
elsewhere. We forget that it is not knowledge which is stored up as
intellectual fat that is of value, but that which is tur