that we may call spinal curvature the professional
disease of the pupil. Doctor Legendre, in a formula which may
be judged over-severe, though unhappily it is only too
well-founded, said of our schools that they are factories for
the production of the deformed and the myopic.

"The main cause of myopia is to be found in the very
conditions under which children are gathered together in
schools: insufficiency of light, the over-small type common
in school-books, the frequent use of the blackboard, on which
the teacher is not always careful to make the size of the
characters he traces proportionate to the distance at which
they have to be read, are so many causes of ocular fatigue.
The visual keenness of a given eye, says Doctor Leprince,
decreases rapidly when the intensity of the light falls below
a certain limit. The pupil, working with insufficient light,
repairs the defective keenness of which this is the cause, by
increasing the visual angle under which the details of the
object he is looking at appear to him; in other words, _he
brings that object inordinately close to him_.

"The time necessary to recognize a given letter increases
greatly, when the limit of visual acuteness has been reached.
Therefore, insufficient light would tend to make work slower,
unless the pupil increased acuteness by approaching the
object more closely. Thus myopia constitutes a positive
adaptation to the defective conditions of work, enabling the
pupil to work more rapidly." [6]

[Footnote 6: Bronardet and Mosny, _Hygiene Scolaire_. Boilliere,
Paris, 1914, pp. 142, 143, 430, 496.]

It would seem therefore natural to say: let the child find himself a
better lighted place; if the blackboard is at some distance from him,
let him come nearer to it; if the insufficient light retards his work,
let him go more slowly; if the questions at issue are such harmless
things as changing a place, advancing a step or two, taking a few
minutes longer over a task--what tyrant on earth would deny such a
small favor, and condemn the suppliant to blindness?

Such a tyrant is the teacher, who aspires to win the affection of his
victims by means of moral exhortations.

It would be so simple to allow children, when tired of sitting, to
rise, and when tired of writing, to desist, and then their bones would
not be twisted. Who can look on unmoved at the spec