ent
child is generally sent to school, and tasked with lessons at an
unusually early age, while the healthy but more backward boy, who
requires to be stimulated, is kept at home in idleness merely on account
of his backwardness. A double error is here committed, and the
consequences to the active-minded boy are not unfrequently the permanent
loss both of health and of his envied superiority of intellect.

In speaking of children of this description, Dr. Brigham, in an
excellent little work on the influence of mental excitement on health,
remarks as follows: "Dangerous forms of scrofulous disease among
children have repeatedly fallen under my observation, for which I could
not account in any other way than by supposing that the brain had been
excited at the expense of the other parts of the system, and at a time
in life when nature is endeavoring to perfect all the organs of the
body; and after the disease commenced, I have seen, with grief, the
influence of the same cause in retarding or preventing recovery. I have
seen several affecting and melancholy instances of children, five or six
years of age, lingering a while with diseases from which those less
gifted readily recover, and at last dying, notwithstanding the utmost
efforts to restore them. During their sickness they constantly
manifested a passion for books and mental excitement, and were admired
for the maturity of their minds. The chance for the recovery of such
precocious children is, in my opinion, small when attacked by disease;
and several medical men have informed me that their own observations had
led them to form the same opinion, and have remarked that, in two cases
of sickness, if one of the patients was a child of superior and
highly-cultivated mental powers, and the other one equally sick, but
whose mind had not been excited by study, they should feel less
confident of the recovery of the former than of the latter. This mental
precocity results from an unnatural development of one organ of the body
at the expense of the constitution."

There can be little doubt but that ignorance on the part of parents and
teachers is the principal cause that leads to the too early and
excessive cultivation of the minds of children, and especially of such
as are precocious and delicate. Hence the necessity of imparting
instruction on this subject to both parents and teachers, and to all
persons who are in any way charged with the care and education of the
young. Th