Consider the postures that miners must endure, or as Pieraccini phrases it, their "disastrous attitudes."

The transport galleries are ordinarily too low to permit a man of average height to walk erect; along these galleries little transport-wagons are run by hand, excepting where the carrying is done on the backs of the men themselves.

"Even in the front of the advance tunnels and in the galleries that are being worked, miners are to be seen in the most incongruous attitudes. These anomalous positions of the body maintained throughout long hours of toil react upon the functional action of the heart and lungs, upon the stomach and intestines in the proper performance of their tasks, and result in producing hernia, varicose veins and eventually deformities of the skeleton (vertebral column, thorax)."[20]

Field labourers also (Fig. 26) become permanently deformed, with diminution of stature, from remaining too long bent over in the act of hoeing or reaping. But a still more painful labour is that of the women in the rice fields during the period when the weeding is done.

The position necessitated by this work requires a strained and prolonged dorsal flexion of the vertebral column, accompanied by a strain on the lower dorsal nerves; great elasticity is required to endure a position so painful and so apt to induce lumbago; only young women can endure it, and even they become deformed, and suffer seriously from anemia, intestinal maladies and diseases of the uterus, which predispose them to abortion or sterility (Figs. 27, 28, 29).

Stone breakers also contract painful diseases and deformities from their work. They are constantly bowed over their task, performing a rhythmic, alternating movement of flexion, extension and torsion of the trunk upon itself, while at the same time there is a slight undulation in a backward and forward direction, accompanying the rising and falling of the arm holding the hammer. These movements of extension and flexion of the trunk involve the whole vertebral column, while the pelvis remains practically motionless. "At the end of the day they rise from their task bowed over and they walk home bowed over, holding the vertebral
column rigid; any attempt to force the trunk into an erect
position is extremely painful. In the morning they return to their work with their loins still aching." And among these stone breakers there are young men, some of them mere boys! And when we think that these injurious attitudes are coupled with malnutrition, we must realise the extent of the organic disaster that accompanies diminution of stature as a result of adaptation to labour.

We are naturally horrified at such conditions enforced upon a certain portion of humanity; and we pray for a time to come when machinery will have universally replaced human labour, in transportation, in stone-breaking, and in reaping, and when children will be spared from hard and deforming toil.

But how is it that while we are so sympathetic regarding conditions at a distance from us, we remain unconscious of similar conditions, that are close beside us, and of which we are the directors, the cruel enforcers, the masters?

In the near future, I hope that people will tell with amazement, as if citing a condition of inferior civilisation, how the school children, up to the opening of the twentieth century represented one category of those "deformed by prolonged and enforced labour in injurious positions!"

Such studies in school hygiene as deal with the type of school benches, designed to minimise the danger of deformities of the vertebral column in children—will, I hope, be regarded by the coming generations with the most utter amazement! And the school benches of to-day will find their place in museums, and people will go to look at them as if they were relics of bygone barbarism, just as we now visit the collections from old-time insane asylums, of series of complicated instruments of wood and iron that in bygone centuries were considered necessary for maintaining discipline among the insane.

What in the world would we say, if somebody should propose, in order to obviate the deformities and physiological injuries of labourers, that certain mechanisms should be applied to them individually for the purpose of diminishing the harm? Imagine a law being proposed, to the effect that all miners should be obliged to wear trusses, to keep their viscera from breaking loose, as a result of prolonged compression! What would we think of such reforms and such a path toward an orthopedic state of society?

Our way toward progress and higher civilisation is a very different one. To remove man from torturing toil that twists the bones and undermines the health—such is the goal that it is our duty to set before us!

For the deformed vertebral column is the extreme sign of a great accumulation of evils; the internal organs are correspondingly affected with disorders fatal to the entire organism; but even greater is the corresponding harm done to the human soul! What we want is not only that the bones shall not be thrown out of their eurhythmic harmony, but that the souls of the labourers shall be freed from the inhuman yoke of slavery (progress can consist solely in a radical alteration of the form of labour).

So far as concerns the school, which is not limited to a few categories of human beings, but is extended to all, by requirements of law, is it not possible for us to adopt a different attitude of mind?

The established fact that the pupils may even deform their skeletons in the course of their work, goes to prove that this work contains some error in principle that is fatal to successive generations; and so long as this principle is maintained, we may assert a priori that even if, with the help of school benches as complicated and as costly as orthopedic machines, we should succeed in checking the deformation of the vertebral column, we should fail to check the deformation of the soul. Because whoever is condemned to labour that deforms is a slave.

And as a matter of fact we employ coercive means, "rewards and punishments," to enforce upon children a condition that in their eyes amounts to serving their first sentence.

It is not the school bench, but the method that needs reforming; it is not the ligaments of the spinal column, but human life in evolution that we ought to respect, and lead toward the attainment of perfection! Amid the many banners of liberty that have been raised in these latter times, one is still missing—one which we ought to seize upon as the standard of our cause: the liberty of the new generation, which is groaning in the slavery of compulsory education, upon iron-bound benches, emblematic of chains!

I foresee, in a radical reform of pedagogic methods, the practical possibility of taking as guiding principles the individual liberty of the pupil and a reverential regard for life. And I affirm this all the more loudly, because I have applied such a method with indisputable success in the "Children's Houses," obtaining prodigious results in the health and happiness of the children, perfect discipline in the classes, marvelously rapid progress in studies, and a surprising awakening of souls, a passionate love for the work.

Variations Due to Adaptation in Connection with Causes of Various Kinds—Social, Physiological, Physical, Psychic, Pathological, Etc.

Physiology and Social Conditions.—Nutrition.—One of the effects of environment, of the highest importance in its relation to the development of stature, is nutrition. In order to attain the maximum development as biologically determined by heredity in a race, sufficient nutriment is the first necessity. It is a familiar fact that material or physiological life consists essentially in the exchange and renewal of matter, or in metabolism, which is also a renewal of vital force.

The living molecules are continually breaking up, thus expressing in an active form forces that had accumulated in a potential form, and eliminating the rejected matter; only to form again by means of new matter, containing potential forces. This breaking up and renewal constitutes the material of life, that never pauses in its molecular movement; the cessation of renewal of matter is death, that is, scission without reparation; consumption without renewal; and consequently a rapid disintegration of the body. Living matter consists in metabolism, and is consequently directly related to the nutritive substances which renew the elements necessary for continual redintegration.

We may disregard certain individual potentialities, of a purely biological nature, and that are capable of manifesting vital forces of varying degrees of intensity: but it may be asserted as beyond question that every living being, if he is to live according to his biological destiny, has need of sufficient nutrition. This is not the same as saving that the food determines the life of an individual in its final development, in the sense that by eating in excess one may attain the stature of a giant, or an imbecile become intelligent or a man of talent become a genius. We all bear within us, in that fertilised germ that constituted the first cell of our organism, predetermined biological conditions, on which depend the physical limits of our body, as well as those of our psychic individuality. But in order that this germ may develop in accordance with its potentiality, it is necessary that it shall obtain the requisite material from its environment. Because otherwise—and here the relation is direct—neither the volumetric development nor the morphological development can be accomplished, nor the psychic potentiality express itself; in other words, the stature will be undersized, in a body defrauded of the degree of beauty potential in the germ, and the muscular forces, in common with those of the brain, will remain at a level of development below that which nature had intended. Consequently, to deprive children of their requisite nutriment is stealing from life, it is a biological crime.

While we live, we must eat; and while we labour, that is, while we expend the vital forces, it is necessary to repair them. The schools should establish a system of luncheons for the pupils; this is a principle that has already been generally recognised and is already bearing fruit.

There was a time when a good appetite was regarded as a low material instinct; it was also the time when people sang the praises of spirituality, but actually indulged in banquets of Lucullian lavishness. The vice of the palate and the physiological need of nourishment were included under one and the same disdain.

To-day science has shed its light upon the true conception of nutrition and holds it to be the first necessity of life, and consequently the first social problem to be solved.

From this point of view, food is not a vulgar material thing, nor the dinner-table a place of debauchery. Indeed, there is nothing which affords better proof of immateriality than the act of eating. In fact, the necessity of eating is itself a proof that the matter of which our body is composed does not endure but passes like the fleeting moment. And if the substance of our bodies passes in this manner, if life itself is only a continual passing away of matter, what greater symbol of its immateriality and its spirituality is there than the dinner-table?

"... the bread is my flesh and the wine is my blood; do this in remembrance of what life really is."

Something similar to this is being accomplished to-day by science in regard to the sexual relations. We are accustomed to consider the sexual instincts as something contemptible, material and low, praising abstinence, and leaving these instincts wholly out of consideration in the course of education, as though they were something degrading, or even shameful. And undoubtedly our sexual abuses are shameful, and shameful also is the barbaric tolerance of the masses regarding prostitution, seduction, illegitimacy and the abandonment of new-born children. It is criminal abuse that makes us despise sexual relations, just as at one time excesses of the table made us despise nutrition. But the day will come when science will raise to the dignity of a new sexual morality the physiological function which to-day is considered material and shameful—and that comprehends the most sublime of human conceptions. In it are to be found the words which ancient races deposited in their religious tabernacles: creation, eternity, mystery. And in it are also to be found the most sublime conceptions of modern races: the destiny of humanity, the perfectionment of the human species.

Accordingly, we must to-day regard the serving of food in the schools as a necessity of the first order; but it is well, in introducing it into the schools, to surround it with that halo of gladness and of high moral significance that ought to accompany all manifestations of life. The hymn to bread, which is a human creation and a means of preserving the substance of the human body, ought to accompany the meals of our new generations of children. The child develops because the substance of his body passes away, and the meals that he eats symbolise all this: furthermore, they teach him to think of the vast labour accomplished by men who, unknown as individuals, cultivate the earth, reap the grain, grind the flour, and provide for all men and for all children. Where they are and who they are, we do not know; the bread bears neither their name nor their picture. Like an impersonal entity, like a god, humanity provides for all the needs of humanity: and this god is labour. If the child is destined some day to become himself a labourer, who produces and casts his products to humanity without knowing who is to receive his contribution toward providing for humanity, it is well that as he lifts his food to his lips he should realise that he is contracting a debt toward society at large, and that he must give because he takes; he must "forgive debts as his have been forgiven"; and since life is gladness, let him send forth a salutation to the universal producing power: "Our Father, give us our daily bread!"

The Providence of human labour rules over our entire life; it gives us everything that is necessary. The God of the Universe, in whose train come cataclysms, is not more terrible than the god, Humanity, that can give us War and Famine. While we give bread to the child, let us remember that man does not live by bread alone: because bread is only the material of his fleeting substance.

The system of furnishing meals in school constitutes a chapter of School Hygiene that cannot directly concern us. Nevertheless, there are three rules of this hygiene which should be borne in mind: Children should never, in any case, drink wine, alcoholic liquors, tea or coffee—in other words, stimulants, which are poisons to their childish organisms. On the other hand, children need sugar, because sugar has a great formative and plastic power; all young animals have sweetish flesh because their muscles, in the course of development, are extremely rich in sugar. The method of giving sugar to children should be as simple as possible, such, for instance, as is endorsed by the very successful English system of hygiene for children, which recommends freshly cooked fruits, sprinkled with sugar or served with a little syrup. But the substantial nourishment for young children should consist of soup or broth served hot, since heat is as essential as sugar for organisms in the course of evolution.

The English recommend soups made of cereals and gluten, in which it is never necessary to use soup stock, just as it is never necessary to use meat in children's diet.

That nutrition has a noteworthy influence upon growth, and therefore upon the definitive limits of stature, is exhaustively proved by statistics.

In his brilliant studies of the poorer classes, Niceforo has collected the following average statures:[21]

from which it appears that, in spite of the strong biological impulse given by the attainment of puberty, the children of the poor continue to show a stature lower than that of the well-to-do. Alĕs Hrdlĭcka has compiled the following comparative table of the poor or orphaned children received into the asylums, and the pupils of the public schools in Boston:

Even after reaching the adult age these differences are maintained, as may be shown by the following statistics taken from various authorities:

from which it appears that while in Italy the class of labourers having the lowest stature is the peasant class, which lives under the most deplorable economic conditions, in England on the contrary it is the workers in the cities who live under worse economic conditions than the peasantry, it being well known that the English peasant is the most prosperous in the agricultural world.

According to Livi, it is nutrition which causes the differences of average stature that are usually to be found between different social classes, and those between the inhabitants of mountains and of plains, or between the dwellers on the mainland and on the islands. In general the mountain-bred peasants have a lower stature than those of the plains; and this is because the means of procuring food are fewer and harder in mountainous regions.

Similarly, the islanders, because of less ready means of communication, have less likelihood than those on the mainland of obtaining adequate nutrition.

The same may be said regarding the differences found between the statures of cultured persons and of the illiterate, to the disadvantage of the latter (the poorer classes).

Students show the tallest stature of all, because they have in their favour the joint effect of the two chief factors of environment that influence this anthropological datum: mechanical causes and nutrition. A sedentary life, and above all a hearty diet both contribute to the tall stature of students, doctors, and members of the liberal professions. In this respect, the average figures of all the authorities agree, as appears from the following tables:[22]

LIVI: 256,166 ITALIAN SOLDIERS

ROBERT AND RAWSON: 1935 ADULT ENGLISHMEN

OLORIZ: 1798 CONSCRIPTS FROM THE CITY OF MADRID

Conditions of nutrition, which are always accompanied by a combination of other hygienic conditions all tending toward the same effects, have also an influence upon the development of puberty.

Puberty is retarded by malnutrition. As a result of an inquiry made among the inmates of the Pia Barolo Society, which offers an asylum to reformed prostitutes, Marro[23] records that out of ninety rescued girls only those above the age of fourteen had begun to menstruate: notwithstanding that the normal period for the development of puberty in Italian women is between the years of twelve and thirteen. Furthermore, among the girls above the age of fourteen, menstruation had not yet begun in all cases; on the contrary, a large proportion of them still failed to show the phenomena of puberty:

All the rest (thirty in number) menstruated for the first time after the age of eighteen.

Among those in whom menstruation had appeared earlier, the order of appearance was as follows:

When we consider that we are dealing with rescued girls, we may conclude that direct sexual stimulus does not facilitate the normal development of puberty, but on the contrary, in conjunction with other causes, retards it. Accordingly, we must not confound the normal development of the organism with its disorders: whatever aids the natural development of life is useful and healthy. There may be conditions unfavourable to the development of puberty, which are favourable to the development of sexual vices (see, further on, the other causes influencing puberty, and moral conditions in colleges).

In his work above cited, Marro compares his figures obtained from the Pia Barolo Society with those of Dr. Bianco[24] taken from 78 young girls in city institutes representing young women in easy circumstances:

It should be noted that the cold climate of Turin retards puberty (see below): but the above table clearly shows the precocious puberty of young women in easy circumstances; in the great majority, in fact, it occurs between the ages of twelve and fourteen, with thirteen for the average; on the other hand, the majority for reformed prostitutes is between fourteen and sixteen, with fifteen for the average.

Besides labour and nutrition, there are other factors that contribute to the development of stature (which we regard as an index to the entire mass of the body). Such factors are:

Physical Conditions—Heat, Light, Electricity

Thermic Conditions.—Among the physical conditions which may have an influence upon the stature, the thermic conditions ought to receive first consideration.

It is a principle demonstrated by nature that organisms in the course of evolution have need of heat. Even the invertebrates, as for example the insects, develop during the heat of summer; and the eggs of the higher vertebrates such as the birds, develop their embryo by means of the maternal warmth. In placental animals the development throughout the whole embryonic period takes place within the maternal womb, in the full tide of animal heat. In order to preserve life in premature babies, that is, in those born before the expiration of the physiological term of nine months, incubators have been constructed, an oven-like arrangement in which the child may be maintained at a temperature considerably higher than would be possible in the outside air; the term is also specifically used of the structures in which fertilised hens' eggs are kept during the required period of time until the chickens are hatched.

Accordingly it is a principle taught us by nature that organisms in the course of evolution have need of heat. The most luxuriant vegetation, the most gigantic animals, the most variegated birds belong to the fauna and flora of the tropics.

How is this physiological law, which nature expresses in such broad, general lines, to be interpreted by us in the environment of the school? It is well known that in this regard there are two conflicting opinions. There are some who would go to excessive lengths in protecting small children from the cold, by dressing them entirely in woolen garments and keeping their apartments well heated; others on the contrary assert that the physiological struggle of adaptation to the cold invigorates the infant organism, and they advise that the child's body should never be completely protected, as for example that the legs should always be left bare, that the child should be lightly clad, that his apartments should not be heated, etc.

Furthermore, it used to be held in the pietistic schools, and still is to some extent, that warmth had a demoralising influence, inasmuch as it tended to enervate both mind and body.

We educators cannot fail to be interested in such a discussion. As often happens in physiological arguments, the two opposite contentions each contain a part of the truth. In order to get at the truth of the matter, it is necessary to distinguish two widely separated facts: on the one hand, physiological exercise in the form of thermal gymnastics, and on the other, the development of organisms in a constantly cold environment.

To live constantly warm, protected either by clothes or by artificial heat, so that the organism remains always at a constant temperature, is not favourable to growth, because it deprives the organism of the physiological exercise of adapting itself to variations in external temperature, an exercise which stimulates useful functions. By perspiring in summer, we cleanse our system of poisonous secretions, and by shivering in winter we give tone to our striped muscles and to our internal organs, as is proved by our gain in appetite. Anyone who wishes to be kept on ice in summer and to transform his apartment into a hot-house in winter, robs himself of these advantages and enfeebles his system.

The apparent comfort is not in this case a real physiological enjoyment but a weakness of habit that is accompanied by a loss of physiological energy. What makes us robust is a rational exercise of all our energies. Thermal gymnastics is consequently useful. It consists in exposing a healthy, resistant organism to changes in temperature, trusting to our physiological resources for the means of defense. Thus, for example, a child who is well fed and well protected from the cold for many hours of the day in the well-heated family apartment, can go out with bare legs into the snow; and doing so will make him more robust. In the same way, the ancient Romans exposed themselves in their hot baths to the steadily increasing temperature of the calidarium, up to the point of 60 degrees (140 Fahrenheit), and then still perspiring flung themselves into a cold plunge. And it is a familiar fact that afterward they held lavish banquets in these same baths. Such exercise which in classic times gave vigour to the race that made itself master of the world may be summed up as follows: "Thermic gymnastics" of organisms "well nourished and strong."

Our own boatmen also throw themselves into the river in midwinter, half nude, and half nude they ply their long poles. They expose themselves to the cold, in the same way that they might raise a weight of many pounds with their robust arms, for gymnastic exercise.

But all this differs radically from living continually in a cold temperature. It is a very different thing from the life of a child of the lower classes, who goes bare-foot in winter, clad in a few scant rags, half frozen in his wretched tenement, and unable to obtain sufficient nourishment to develop the needed heat-units. He is already deficient in bodily heat because of malnutrition, and the effects of cold are cumulative. In this case it is not a question of thermic exercise but of a permanent deprivation of heat, in individuals who are already suffering from an insufficient development of heat-units. Consequently the organism is enfeebled—it grows under unfavorable conditions—and the result is a permanent diminution of development. Whoever grows up, exposed to cold after this fashion, has, in the average case, a lower stature than those who grow up in the midst of warmth, or in the practice of that healthful exercise which constitutes the ideal: thermic gymnastics.

The contradictory ideas that are held as to the efficacy of heat in regard to growth, are due to a large extent to a prejudice which amounts to this: heat is effective in promoting the evolution of life as a whole, and consequently the development of that part of life that is centred in the organs of reproduction; from which comes the wellnigh antiquated theory that artificial heat should be banished from the schools, as one of the factors leading to immorality! It is true that warmth accelerates the development of puberty; but who is there in this twentieth century who can still conceive the idea that it is a moral act to silence the forces of nature? Good nourishment also leads to a more precocious puberty; and the same is true of the repeated psychic stimulus produced by various forms of intellectual enjoyment, by conversation, and by social intercourse with individuals of the opposite sex. Accordingly, if it were a moral act to retard the development of puberty and to produce a general impoverishment of sexual life, the moral measures to be taken in education would be cold, malnutrition, and the isolation of the sexes in the schools, which, as a matter of fact, form the stumbling-block of environment in our colleges. But it is well known that all this leads on the contrary to moral and physical degeneration! As has already been said, the normal physiological development stands in counterdistinction to immoral habits; consequently, whatever is an aid to physiological development is in its very nature moral.

In warm climates the first manifestations of puberty occur precociously in man as well as in woman; and with them come all the transformations that are associated with puberty, among others the rapid increase of stature. In cold climates, on the contrary, such manifestations are more tardy. The women of Lapland are latest of all to develop. With them, menstruation begins only at eighteen, and they are incapable of conceiving under the age of twenty, while the period of the menopause (involution of sexual life) is correspondingly early; in other words, the entire period of sexual life is shortened. Furthermore, the fertility of the women of Lapland is low; they cannot conceive more than three children. But if these same women leave Lapland and make their home in civilised countries, as for example in Sweden, they have a more precocious sexual life, as well as longer and more fertile, and altogether quite similar to that of the Swedish women.[25]

Cabanis[26] notes that even in cold climates, when young girls spend much of their time in the vicinity of stoves, menstruation begins at about the same age as in women who live on the banks of the Ganges—as is the case with the daughters of wealthy Russians, whose development is quite precocious. In Arabia, in Egypt, and in Abyssinia the women are frequently mothers at the age of ten, menstruation having begun at the eighth year. It is even said that Mahomed married Radeejah when she was only five and that he took her to his bed at the age of eight. The religious laws of India permit the marriage of girls when they are eight years old.

Consequently it is true that heat has an influence upon the development of the organism independently of other influences; in fact, heat acts both in the form of climate, that is, in a natural state, and also in an artificially warmed environment. It is also one of the causes of the different degrees of growth in stature through the successive seasons (see below).

In conclusion: it is enjoined upon us, as a hygienic necessity, to heat the schools in winter, especially the schools for the poorer classes; it means more than increased vigour, it may even mean giving life to some who otherwise would pine away from deprivation of heat-units, a condition most unfavourable to organisms in the course of evolution.

Photogenic Conditions.—Light also has a perceptible influence upon growth: it is a great physiological stimulant. At the present day, physical therapy employs light baths for certain forms of neurasthenia and partial enfeeblement of certain organs; and some biological manifestations, such as the pigments—and similarly the chlorophyl in plants and the variegated colouring of birds—receive a creative stimulus from light.

Light contains in its spectrum many different colours, which act quite differently upon living tissues; the ultra-violet rays, for instance, kill the bacilli of tuberculosis and sometimes effect cures in cases of cancer. Psychiatrists and neuropaths have demonstrated that many colours of light have an exciting effect, while others, on the contrary, are sedative.

Hence there has arisen in medicine a vast and most interesting chapter of phototherapy.

In regard to the phenomena of growth, it has been noted that certain coloured lights are favourable to it, while certain others, on the contrary, diminish or arrest it, as the red and the green.

Phototherapy ought to concern us as educators, especially in regard to schools for the benefit of nervous children: a periodic sojourn in a room lit by calming colours might have a beneficent effect upon epileptic, irritable, nervous children, in place of the debilitating hot bath, or, worse yet, the administration of bromides; while light-baths would be efficacious for weak and torpid children.

But for normal children we must consider the light of the sun as the best stimulant for their growth. A sojourn at the sea-shore, so favourable to the development of children, is now believed to owe its beneficial effects to the fact that the child, playing half naked on the sea-shore, bathes more in the sunlight than he does in the salt water. Gymnastics in the sun, while the body is still only half dry, is what the younger generations should practise on a large scale, if they would bring about the triumph of physiological life.

We must not forget this great principle when, by planning home work for the pupils, we practically keep them housed during the entire day, keeping them for the most part employed in writing or reading; in other words, using their sense of sight, which, if it is to be preserved unharmed, demands a moderate light. The eye ought to rest its muscles of accommodation, and the whole body be exposed to the full light of the sun during the greater part of the day. Let us remember that often the children of the poor live in a home so dark that even in full mid-day they are obliged to light a lamp! Let us at least leave them the light of the street, as a recompense for wretchedness that is a disgrace to civilisation!

According to certain experiments conducted in Rome by Professor Gosio, the light of the sun has an intensive effect upon life. Living creatures reared in the solar light grow and mature earlier, but at the same time their life is shortened; that is, the cycle of life is more intense and more precocious; conversely, in the shade the cycle of life is slower, but of longer duration. A plant matures more quickly in the sun, but its stature is lower than that of a plant in the dark, which has grown far more slowly, but has become very tall and slender and lacking in chlorophyl. Similarly, as is well known, the women in tropical countries attain a precocious puberty, while conversely those of the North attain it tardily; and this fact must be considered in relation to the influence of the sun. A life passed wholly in the sunlight would be too intense; an organism that is exposed a few hours each day to the rays of the sun is invigorated; the interchange of matter (metabolism) is augmented; all the tissues are beneficially stimulated. For this reason sun baths are employed for paralytic and idiot children, and consist in exposing the body of the child, reclining upon its bed and with its head well protected, to the direct rays of the sun for several hours a day; this treatment is found to be most efficacious in giving tone to the tissues and improving the general condition of the system.

Variations in the Growth of Stature According to the Seasons.—One proof of the beneficent influence of heat and sunlight upon the growth of the organism, is afforded by the variations in the rate of growth according to the seasons. Every individual grows more in summer than in winter. Daffner gives the following figures relative to the increase in stature according to the seasons:

In the "Children's Houses," I require a record of stature to be made month by month in the case of every child, the measurement being taken on the day corresponding to the day on which he was born in the month of his birth; in addition to which I keep a record of the total annual increase.

The ages of these children vary between three and four years, and they all belong to the poorer social classes.

MONTHLY AVERAGE INCREASE IN STATURE
In the "Children's Houses" (In millimetres)