sometimes contemptuously as weaklings,
they are accused of laziness, craziness, and haziness. In their
psychic attempts to compensate, they land into all kinds of hot water,
from which friends, relatives or luck extricate them sometimes. The
other times they go to the wall.

The congenital adrenal deficient is a special problem. If the history
of such an individual is followed from birth, one gets a pretty
typical story. The genealogy is nervous. Nervous is a word of many
meanings. But when parents confess themselves nervous, it generally
means a mental and emotional instability of some sort. Sometimes the
idea is camouflaged as high strung. In the feeding narrative of the
child, one finds not occasional incidents or episodes, but continued
trouble, difficulties, adventures. Even after the first year or two,
the nutritional chronicle is not satisfactory. Lack of appetite, lack
of energy, lack of response to stimuli are its keynotes and the motifs
of the later years of childhood.

Growth is a strain. It becomes a task to make these children grow
and gain. Chronically below the average weight and height, herculean
efforts are made by the conscientious parents, but with small success.

With the entry of school life and competition, the curtain rises upon
the real tragedy, a tragedy in which the avenging Fates are the usual
ignorance, stupidity and misunderstanding. If the teachers alone are
duty-obsessed, or perhaps sadistic, the child endures the agonies of
repeated admonitions, demotions, and punishments. However, a certain
thick-skinned indifference may develop to protect the sufferer.

If the parents are in addition ambitious, or proud, or competitive,
then woe betide the victim. With their nervous dispositions, it is
the school and the tutor who are to be blamed, if not the child. From
school to school, from system to system, from novelty to fad, from
doctor to doctor, from fakir to charlatan, from pillar to post, they
wander in search of an education. Educational cults by the dozen have
sprouted and grown fat around these unfortunates.

The chief defect of the congenital adrenal inadequate is an
insufficiently developed adrenal cortex. That means an insufficiently
developed brain and nervous system. For we have seen how closely all
these are related in development. Now education can never be the
education of a vacuum. And we have to deal here with a relative
vacuum. When there are no potentialities, there can be