something like the imagination for the mind. No one would attempt to say that fancy, in all its multifarious forms, is getting ready to think severely. So I think it is but a partial view that play is simply fore-activities that later will become work.

Play is really universalizing - Froebel understood that. The child does everything by play, and the real object of a good deal of play is not anticipatory of work. We have a long list of plays which we cannot explain in any other wise than as the necessary activity of rudimentary organs of the mind and body. What are the rudimentary organs, so called? They are organs both of mind and body, that pass away or disappear, that are absorbed before maturity is attained; hence, of course, the activity of these cannot be anticipatory of work. But it is very important to exercise these rudimentary organs and functions.

Children have to live over, in a great many respects, the activities of the race, as everyone knows. They have to be in petto savages and fetich-worshipers, and that sort of thing, and it is necessary that these rudimentary organs, which are going to vanish out of sight, some of which are to be subordinated by the development of higher organs, shall be exercised. It is a very curious thing that the vermiform appendix and certain muscles of the body—for instance, certain points about the hips — have to be exercised at certain periods that they may vanish; and if they are not exercised at such periods, they do not vanish when the proper time comes, but they remain as pensioners, as they may be termed, on the body.

In the case of rudimentary organs, use means disappearance. It tends to make them vanish, and it is therefore very necessary, as a part of nature's economy in cleaning house, so to speak--in getting rid of superfluities. This is just as true of the mind as it is of the body. If there were time, I think I could convince the most reluctant that children need to lie, and that they need to practice certain things which, if adults did them, would be criminal. If they are not allowed to do these things when they are babies or children, when these activities are not criminal, then they do not reduce these rudimentary organs, and they grow, and the criminality or vice, or whatever it may be, is liable to break out in later years. Hence the functions of some things which we rather too strict pedagogs call vice and crime are, some of them, most beneficial, and we need to give childhood large latitude in both what it does and thinks and feels, in order that we shall clear the soul of the débris of the past stage of evolution and make a platform for the development of humanity; that we may lay the basis strong and deep.

If the child does not have a chance to give vent to these faculties at the time when they are plastic and can be vanquished, then they are liable to grow with the child's growth, and we find abnormalities creeping out in a few years.

This is a function of play which Mr. Grosse and his school have not recognized, but it is so well established that it has become almost a commonplace with those who have given the subject attention. This does not mean, to anyone who happens to be hot for controversy, that we shall put the children thru a course of vice, thru a course of barbarism, or thru a course of immorality, in order to cleanse and purgate their souls; but it is simply the development of the good Aristotelian doctrine that, if a man goes to a theater and sees a man choking another, he goes home from the theater less likely to choke a man himself; that, if he saw vice on the stage, it unloaded the tendency to vice in himself. That theory has not quite developed itself, and it is an extreme theory of æsthetic or dramatic art; but without doubt there is some truth in it.

When the judgments can be pre-formed by stories in childhood, they seem in later years as something they have imagined or dreamed; so, when we control the fancy of the child, we are laying down paths over which conduct is to run its main traffic in later years. That is the doctrine and the theory of play.

There should be a great deal of latitude and liberty, and a good deal of diminution of our severity, in judging the conduct of children. We forget that their souls and bodies come into the world freighted with the promise of all that is best, and also freighted with

a great deal of what is worst, in the world; that their bodies and minds send their roots deep down into the animal kingdom, and that we have not a single organ of our body or a single cell that we have not inherited from an animal ancestry; and that is, to some extent, true at least of some of the basal qualities of the soul's instincts and feelings. Hence one of the functions of play is to vent all these bad activities and to do in play form what constituted the lives of savages, and, if you want to be evolutionists, the lives of animals. It is necessary to exercise these things, so that the organs which they represent may be reduced, because these lower activities call into action higher powers that reduce them. That is the way it works. So that sometimes it is a good thing for a child to rouse its conscience thru some such exercise, and later they are much less likely to do that same thing again.

Of course, we must not apply our adult standards of morality to little children. Let them be wild. Let them play, with their lies of fancy and imagination. The soul is larger than a fact; the soul needs to be the instigator of all faculties and the seat of all dreams. Childhood will have its rights in spite of us pedagogs; and it is a good thing. It is necessary, in order to relieve that hunger for something that is larger. If you don't give them the gracious lies of poetry, with perhaps a great deal of imagination in it, they will make them. That is the play of the mind.

Another of the recent lines of investigation, which I think has been very fruitful, has been directed toward the laws of fatigue, as you all know. We have had everywhere studies of fatigue. How long is the normal period of study for this child? For what age? How does it affect blood pressure? How does it affect sleep? How does it affect reaction? And so on.

If you set children at work when they are fatigued, you are cultivating, not scholarship, but nervousness, and that is an awful thing. The American nerves are in danger. The American child is the most nervous child in the world. According to the child studies that have been made, it has more automatism than any other child. It is more easily upset; its mind is quick, alert, and it matures younger than most children. The American child is liable to get on its nerves; cannot stop play; cannot go to sleep readily; jumps and twitches when it does go to sleep. That is a product of fatigue. If we could only find a way of getting children for work when their minds are in their best condition, we should get results much superior to what we do get. The mind which is really fresh can do several fold more work than the mind which is fatigued. That is why refreshment is good when given in the kindergarten, as it is in some. The practice which prevails in some of the kindergartens of allowing naps in the middle of the day is good. It is one way of systematically restoring and saving the child from one of the great enemies of the human race - fatigue.

The trouble with work in the schools is that it brings on fatigue, which tends not only to neurasthenia, but to degeneration and arrest, and that is something that the little girl is very much more prone to than the little boy. It is a very impressive and significant fact that the female organism has the power to draw upon its reserves much more readily than the male organism. That is true of the body and of the mind. It is very much easier for a woman to overdo and not know it; very much easier to draw upon those reserves which are meant by nature to go to posterity, or to future life, or to longevity to draw upon them and not know it; and when the crises come incidental to motherhood, change of life, and old age, then these troubles come back. That is a thing we need to bear in mind: the trouble with work is that it means worry. Work is all right. You can do a great amount of work, just so long as you keep well nourished and sleep, and keep from anxiety; but the anxious child, the hard-worked child, the child that has to do too much, is in danger. We see it in athletics. There is, indeed, a great danger that boys who train in college will draw upon their vital organism, so that, if there is any trouble of the heart or lungs, the athlete is the one who breaks down. The easy-living one does not.

I did not mean to take the time of the convention to talk at length about these vast themes; my intention was simply to introduce the speakers and to invite discussion upon

all the papers.

A MEMBER.- What about habit in the instance to which you referred of the child that lied?

DR. HALL.-The age of habit really has not dawned yet. It is to come later. The period of habituation is really from about eight or nine to twelve; those four years are specially sacred to the formation of habits and automatism.

MRS. PUTNAM.-Would you curtail that lying-I don't like to call it that exactly— but that extravagance ?

DR. HALL.—I think curtailment should come very early in life, and should be gradually introduced as the mind expands.

A MEMBER. Would you make a distinction between the lie of the imagination and the lie to escape punishment for wrong-doing?

DR. HALL. Yes, indeed. I am very glad you asked that question. Of course, the lies of the imagination are, as Plato called them, "gracious lies;" the lies that make poetry, which are lies only to gradgrinds, that want facts, only facts. But the meanest and most censurable lies are lies which are told to escape the natural consequences of acts. Those are a totally different thing, and it is unfortunate they have the same name. I think psychologists make several classes of lies-the natural lie, the lie of the imagination, the generous lie, etc.

MRS. PUTNAM.- Why can't you give them another name?

DR. HALL.-I think we can. It is a question of the dictionary, perhaps of inventing a Greek word, but people don't like new words as a rule.

A MEMBER. You say that by using these organs which eventually disappear, or are intended to disappear, higher organs will develop. Now, suppose that activity promotes the growth of these lower organs, and the higher organs do not develop, will not those organs retain their life?

DR. HALL.- No.

A MEMBER. The only organ you mentioned is the vermiform appendix. I presume that that does remain. Now, would it not remain in the case of activity, if something higher in the organism did not develop to serve the purpose for which that was originally intended, in the lower life?

DR. HALL.- No, it would not. I am reluctant to use my old illustration, because I have used it so often, of the tadpole's tail. We know that the tadpole is going to become a frog. It is born in the water and it is going to live on land very largely. Suppose we say: "We won't have this low species of mere fish life." Suppose some pedagog of pollywogs should come in and say: "We will shorten this line, we will cut off the tail; or else we won't let them use the tail, so that it won't grow. Therefore we will straighten the way for the growth of the pollywog." But if the tail did not grow, if it was not exercised, the result would be that the legs would not grow, and the animal would have no means of locomotion at all. Some people think that a tadpole's tail falls off. There never was a tail that fell off. It is absorbed. It has to be developed in order that you may have the legs later. Again, take the gill slits. All of us have gill slits some months before birth. Some have gill slits at birth; in many cases of deformity they are seen. They are indubitable signs of the aquatic origin of life. As the embryo develops, this particular gill slit is twisted around and makes two of the muscles of the eye. One of them is transformed slowly, develops, and becomes the principal part of the fauces, makes the vocal cords, and makes a part of the larynx, which is used in swallowing. Another is twisted around and makes the Eustachian tubes. Another one does not disappear, and makes the thyroid glands, whose use we do not know. Suppose you could eliminate the gill slits. You would eliminate those higher organs which grow out of them. That is

what I mean by the transformation which is stimulated by use. organs develop out of the lower.

Use makes these higher

A MEMBER. I want to ask another question. You say, where exercise has not been given to those lower organs, that there is necessarily stunted growth in the higher organs developed from those lower organs. You were speaking of the mind, weren't you, and not of the physical nature?

DR. HALL.Both.
THE MEMBER.

You declare it as a principle that where there has been a stunted growth of the lower organism there must be a corresponding deformity or stunted growth of the higher organs on which these are based.

DR. HALL. That is it exactly. What would happen if the higher organ was developed excessively and the lower stunted, if such a thing could be? You would have, in that case, the precocious Christian that John Stuart Mill describes. He says it is a bad thing for children to get converted too early; that is, at seven or eight years of age. And he goes on to say, in the well known, oft-quoted phrase, which you have no doubt heard, that children who are pious early are very much like early risers — very good in the forenoon of life, and very stupid and dull in the afternoon. There is a certain season when nature seems to have decreed that religion should begin its great and sacred work of transformation, which is the most important thing in the world. It seems to belong in a certain period of growth. It cannot come too early; it cannot come too late. There is a nascent period where it belongs, and the conversion curves rise up at sixteen or seventeen, and then fall much lower. All the confirmation ceremonies in all the churches in all denominations thruout the world - Greek, Catholic, Jew are just then. That is the special period. If it is earlier, the danger is it will be a kind of vaccination. You will have the "chicken-pox" form of religion, and not the true thing.

A MEMBER.— I believe there are current theories with regard to the laws of biology, that the use of an organ develops it. Now, how can you reconcile that idea with the notion that the use of the pollywog's tail eliminates it? Don't we have to say that the pollywog's tail disappears because the energy goes to the working of some other parts of the organism, and does not disappear because it is exercised, but that there is development because it comes into action, and that the working of the tail has nothing to do with the disappearance of the tail ?

DR. HALI.. I thought I stated I stated it as clearly as I could- that this is absolutely an exception to the general law, the Lamarckian law of use and disuse. You are quite correct, as you know, in stating the general theory of Lamarck, which every biologist holds, that, in general, use strengthens and disuse weakens. But in the use of the rudimentary organs, after they have reached their acme of development, this law is reversed. To ask why is to ask why the sun does not rise in the west. It is just as universal a law as the Lamarckian law. When the rudimentary has reached its maximum, the more you use it, the faster it degenerates. Take the case of some physical diseases, as consumption at a certain stage the general use of the lungs hastens the decomposition of tissue. We see it, too, in many forms of degeneration and disease. Excessive use when the organ is on the way down accelerates the process of deterioration; that is one of the great laws of the world.

MRS. PUTNAM.-To return to our theme, I think the children's work in the kindergarten comes from the things that they see about them. They see their mothers making bread and they want to make bread. Do you call that work or play?

DR. HALL. I call that play.

MRS. PUTNAM.—I tried to make plain in my paper that there was not a distinction at the kindergarten age between work and play. They merge one into the other in such a way that I do not care to try to separate them; I do not know that I could if I wanted to.

A MEMBER. I speak as a mother. I should like our boys and girls to be factors in

the home, part of the home. Ought not they to be made to feel that they are factors in the home and have their little tasks to do? If it is play, all the better; but if it is work, will it not make them better boys and girls? Just as father and mother work to make the home beautiful, ought not children to feel that they have something to do with that? If we can make it play, all right. But if we cannot, isn't it the mother's duty and the father's duty to see that those tasks are done, to make the boys better men and the girls better women?

DR. HALL.— That is it exactly. Just in proportion as the mother and father have ingenuity enough to make the children think their work is play, they are pedagogical, and they are doing the best possible work. But just as soon as they lack the wit and lack the pedagogical instinct to make the children think it is play, and they are reluctantly forced to do it, that is a different thing. With regard to the kindergarten, my point was this: it seems to me there is a little too much tendency to make the children overwork in doing a certain set of things, making products out of paper, something of that sort, when you have the whole world of play, which is infinitely larger than the Froebel's gifts, to draw from. I think we get more activity, more discipline, train the imagination better, help the soul, than if we try to transmute play into work.

MRS. PUTNAM.-Two weeks ago a mother of a boy came to me. She was a stranger, and she said: "I came to you to see if you could give me any help in regard to my boy. He is an absolute kleptomaniac; he has been stealing from the time he was three years old, and now he is beginning to do it consciously, and is beginning to cover his tracks. I felt it was something he would grow out of; I felt it was something I could indirectly meet; and I let him alone. Now he has got the habit. Now, what are you going to do ?" I could not give her any help; but, if your rule holds good, he should go on stealing.

DR. HALL.-I think all these individual cases should be met precisely as a physician should meet a case of physical disease.

MRS. PUTNAM.- I told her to write to you and find out.

DR. HALL.—I get hundreds of letters from anxious mothers about cases of that kind. What shall I do? I say: I can't tell anything about it unless I can see your child. You would not think of writing to a doctor at a distance, probably, asking: "What medicine shall I give for this, that, and the other symptoms?" I know of a family in Boston that had a son who was a kleptomaniac. They thought the best thing to do was to let him steal and get punished for it, a week or some days, in prison. He did; and it proved to be a good thing for him. It might not be a good thing for another boy. You must use your best judgment, and not have a rule that you cannot bend to suit the individual.

PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS, KINDERGARTEN DEPARTMENT MISS EVELYN HOLMES, DIRECTOR OF SOUTH CAROLINA KINDERGARTEN TRAINING SCHOOL, CHARLESTON, S. C.

Since the early seventies the kindergarten has held a prominent place among the departments of the National Educational Association. Its influence cannot be estimated. From the pioneer days, when every inch of ground had to be fought over and won by dint of much speaking as well as doing; when its enemies were of its own household, namely, the educators of that day, who, succumbing one by one, as the force of the truth of Froebel's educational principles became clear to them, have happily become its exponents; from that far-away day to the present