build a highly developed intellect
and a stable temperament. In childhood the intimate connection between
vigour of mind and vigour of body is almost always clearly shown. A
child with rickets, unable to exercise his body in free play, as a
rule shows a flabbiness of mind in keeping with his useless muscles
and yielding bones. Such children talk late, are infantile in their
habits and ways of thought, and are more emotional and unstable than
healthy children of the same age. The connection between bodily
ailments and instability of nervous control is even more clearly seen
in the frequent combination of rheumatism and chorea. A very high
proportion of older children suffering from the graver neuroses, such
as chorea, syncopal attacks, phobias, tics, and so forth, show
defective physical development. Scoliosis, lordosis, knock-knee, flat
foot, pigeon chest, albuminuria, cold and cyanosed extremities, are
the rule rather than the exception. If the body of the child is
developed to the greatest perfection of which it is capable we shall
not often find a too sensitive nervous system. The boy of fine
physique may have many faults. He may be bad-tempered or untruthful or
selfish, but such faults as he has are as a rule more primitive in
type, more readily traced to their causes, and more easy to eradicate
than the faults which spring from that timidity, instability, and
moral flabbiness which has so often developed in the lax delicate
child reared softly in mind and body.
PHYSICAL TRAINING
Children thrive best in the healthy open-air life of the country, and
if there is any tendency to nervous disturbances the need for this
becomes insistent. Physical training, further, includes the manual
education of the child. The system of child-training advocated by Dr.
Montessori is based upon the cultivation of tactile sensations and the
development of manual dexterity. Exercises such as she has devised
have an immediate effect in calming the nervous system and in changing
the restless or irritable child into a self-restrained and eager
worker. Lord Macaulay, whose phenomenal memory as a child has become
proverbial, was so extraordinarily unhandy that throughout life he had
considerable difficulty in putting on his gloves, while he had such
trouble with shaving that on his return from India there were found in
his luggage some fifty razors, none of which retained any edge, and
nearly as many strops which had been cut to pieces i
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