cy and
backwardness, and many children are thereby lifted from the hopeless
classes to the group of those requiring only special care and teaching
to be able to be classed as normal.

=Training the Nervous System.=--Professor James said, "The great thing
in education is to make the nervous system the ally, not the enemy.
For this we must make automatic and habitual as many useful actions as
we can and carefully guard against growing into ways which are likely
to be disadvantageous." His advice for self-discipline is to "seize
every first possible opportunity to act on any resolution made, and on
every emotional prompting in the direction of habits one aspires to
gain." Professor Thompson, in his book on _Brain and Personality_,
says, "We can make our own brains, so far as special functions or
aptitudes are concerned, if only we have wills strong enough to take
the trouble." These and many other admonitions in the direction of
more effective mental training show the trend of modern education. How
many a will has been weakened by bad methods of family influence! How
many nervous systems made the enemy of education rather than its ally
by bad family conditions!

The Parent-Teacher Associations are doing valiant service in bringing
to the home the best thought of the school and in bringing to the
school the best feeling of the home. It is not too much to hope that
when the jointure between real education and pure affection is made
more complete we may lessen the toll of incompetent personality and
raise the social standard of human powers. In this connection one
vital thought must not be over-looked, namely, the social advance we
may reasonably expect from the new power of women to select the
fathers of their children. Doctor Sumner said, "During the ages of the
man-family men could not make up their minds what they wanted woman to
become." If that be so, it is still more true that now, as the age of
the man-and-woman-family begins, women are undertaking to make up
their own minds as to what they want to be and to do and are attaining
a freedom of sex-selection such as they have not had before in the
civilization we call our own. Doctor Todd says truly, in his _Theories
of Social Progress_, that "from now onward the centre of selection is
shifted from without to within, from passive adaptation to active
self-determination;" and he adds, "To rationalize sexual selection and
make it serve progress will be to revise the 'mor