r the surface of the gum, and
regaining the power lose it again, or lose at least the desire to exert
it more than once during the active progress of teething. But, holding
the child under its arms, you have but to put its feet to the ground,
and at once it will draw up its legs though it will make no other
movement; or take it on your lap and tickle the soles of its feet, and
laughing or crying, as the mood takes it, it will move its legs about as
freely as you could wish and show that the power is still there, though
for the present the child will not take the trouble to exert it.

Gradual loss of power over one or other leg, especially if attended with
pain either in the back or in the knee or hip, should always call for
attention, and induce you to seek at once for medical advice. Such cases
generally occur later in childhood than the conditions of which I spoke
in the former paragraph, and may depend on disease of the spine or of
the hip-joint, two serious conditions which it needs the medical expert
to discover and to treat.

=Neuralgia and Headache.=--In the grown person neuralgia, as many of us
know to our cost, is by no means infrequent; in the child it is very
rare, and when a child complains of severe pain in the head, or of
severe pain to the knee or hip apart from rheumatism, it is almost
invariably the sign of disease of the brain in the one case, of the
hip-joint in the other. To this rule there are indeed exceptions, but it
will always be well to leave it to the doctor to determine--no easy
matter by the bye--whether any given case is one of the rare exceptions
or not.

There is, however, one form of real _neuralgic headache_ which is by no
means rare in children after the commencement of the second dentition,
and which sometimes goes on into early manhood or womanhood, when it
becomes what is commonly known as sick headache. It is essentially an
ailment of development, incidental to the time when the brain is first
called on for the performance of its higher functions.

It does not by any means always depend on over-study, though I do not
remember meeting with it in children who had not yet gone into the
school-room; and I have frequently found it dependent on too continuous
application, though the number of hours devoted to study in the course
of the day may not have been by any means excessive.

The child's brain soon tires, and the arrangement, so convenient to
parents of morning lessons and aft