ways in transition, leaping from "it to that,"
with superb agility and restlessness. But the exercise it gains from
its movements is its only reward. Its acquisitions are slender in the
extreme. It illustrates, on the mental plane, the truth of the
"rolling stone." It corresponds, as a mental character, to the
muscular restlessness which the same type of child shows in the
earlier period previously spoken of.

The psychological explanation of this "fluid attention" is more or
less plain, but I can not take space to expound it. Suffice it to say
that the attention is itself, probably, in its brain seat, a matter of
the motor centres; its physical seat both "gives and takes" in
co-operation with the processes which shed energy out into the
muscles. So it follows that, in the ready muscular revivals,
discharges, transitions, which we have seen to be prominent in the
motor temperament the attention is carried along, and its "fluidity"
is only an incident to the fluidity of the motor symbols of which this
sort of a mind continually makes use.

Coming a little closer to the pedagogical problems which this type of
pupil raises before us, we find, in the first place, that it is
excessively difficult for this scholar to give continuous or adequate
attention to anything of any complexity. The movements of attention
are so easy, the outlets of energy, to use the physical figure, so
large and well used, that the minor relationships of the thing are
passed over. The variations of the object from its class are swept
away in the onrush of his motor tendencies. He assumes the facts which
he does not understand, and goes right on to express himself in
action on these assumptions. So while he seems to take in what is told
him, with an intuition that is surprisingly swift, and a personal
adaptation no less surprising, the disappointment is only the more
keen when the instructor finds the next day that he has not penetrated
at all into the inner current of this scholar's mental processes.

Again, as marked as this is in its early stages, the continuance of it
leads to results which are nothing short of deplorable. When such a
student has gone through a preparatory school without overcoming this
tendency to "fluid attention" and comes to college, the instructors in
the higher institutions are practically helpless before him. We say of
him that "he has never learned to study," that he does not know "how
to apply himself," that he has no "