y four hours daily. Children between eight and fourteen should not be
confined more than three-quarters of an hour at a time, having the last
quarter of each hour for exercise on the play-ground.

"Indeed, the one thing about which doctors do _not_ disagree is the
destructive effect of premature or excessive mental labor. I can quote
you medical authority for and against every maxim of dietetics beyond the
very simplest; but I defy you to find one man who ever begged, borrowed,
or stole the title of M.D., and yet abused those two honorary letters by
asserting under their cover that a child could safely study as much as a
man, or that a man could safely study more than six hours a day."

"The worst danger of it is that the moral is written at the end of the
fable, not at the beginning. The organization in youth is so dangerously
elastic that the result of these intellectual excesses is not seen until
years after. When some young girl incurs spinal disease from some slight
fall, which she ought not to have felt for an hour, or some business man
breaks down in the prime of his years from some trifling over-anxiety,
which should have left no trace behind, the popular verdict may be
'Mysterious Providence;' but the wiser observer sees the retribution for
the folly of those misspent days which enfeebled the childish constitution
instead of ripening it. One of the most striking passages in the report of
Dr. Ray, before mentioned, is that in which he explains that, 'though
study at school is rarely the immediate cause of insanity, it is the most
frequent of its ulterior causes, except hereditary tendencies.' _It
diminishes the conservative power of the animal economy to such a degree
that attacks of disease which otherwise would have passed off safely
destroy life almost before danger is anticipated_."

It would be easy to multiply authorities on these points. It is hard to
stop. But our limits forbid any thing like a full treatment of the
subject. Yet discussion on this question ought never to cease in the land
until a reform is brought about. Teachers are to blame only in part for
the present wrong state of things. They are to blame for yielding, for
acquiescing; but the real blame rests on parents. Here and there,
individual fathers and mothers, taught, perhaps, by heart-rending
experience, try to make stand against the current of false ambitions and
unhealthy standards. But these are rare exceptions. Parents, as a class,
n