5. Finally, the height of the epigastric cavity above the seat,
augmented by a few centimeters, indicates the height of the
reading-desk.

We may add that in view of the rapid growth of the child, these
measurements should be taken twice in the course of the school year,
and children should be made to change places in accordance with these
measurements.

There is a little crustacean which, coming naked into the world,
chooses an empty shell and adapts itself thereto; when it grows larger
and the shell becomes too tight, it sallies forth and takes up its
abode in a larger one. This the creature does of its own accord,
without a savant to measure it or a teacher to choose a new shell for
it. But to us and to scientists, a child is inferior to this lowly
invertebrate!

The difficulty of keeping forty or fifty children motionless for hours
in the prescribed hygienic attitude, and of finding desks exactly
adapted to these growing bodies, makes this remedy impracticable, so
hunchbacks continue among us. The problem remains unsolved.

Hence it has been deemed more practical to establish a kind of
orthopaedic institution within the building itself in certain model
schools in Rome. It consists of a costly and elaborate apparatus, to
which the pupils come in turn to be suspended by the head after the
method adopted in medicine to combat spinal curvature in Pott's
disease (tuberculosis of the vertebral column) and rickets.

Healthy children, as well as the unsound, suffer by these
applications; but on the other hand, the results afford encouraging
statistics. If this hanging treatment be initiated regularly at the
age of six years it strikes a perfect balance with the injury caused
by prolonged deterioration induced by school desks, and children are
delivered from spinal disease.

* * * * *

=Discoveries of experimental psychology: overwork; nervous
exhaustion=.--Hygiene, making its way into the school, discovered
scholar's spinal curvature and scholar's myopia; experimental
psychology discovered the exhaustion due to overwork, and studied the
_fatigue_ of the scholar. It followed in the beaten track of
medicine--that is to say, it sought to alleviate the ills it had
diagnosed, and instituted a branch of science the title of which is
not very clearly defined as yet, for some call it experimental
psychology applied to the school, others Scientific Pedagogy.

It is necessary to remember that experimental