if there is any tendency to nervous disturbances the need for this
becomes insistent. Physical training, further, includes the manual
education of the child. The system of child-training advocated by Dr.
Montessori is based upon the cultivation of tactile sensations and the
development of manual dexterity. Exercises such as she has devised
have an immediate effect in calming the nervous system and in changing
the restless or irritable child into a self-restrained and eager
worker. Lord Macaulay, whose phenomenal memory as a child has become
proverbial, was so extraordinarily unhandy that throughout life he had
considerable difficulty in putting on his gloves, while he had such
trouble with shaving that on his return from India there were found in
his luggage some fifty razors, none of which retained any edge, and
nearly as many strops which had been cut to pieces in his irritated
and ineffectual efforts. If we teach a child manual dexterity it is an
advantage to him, because manual dexterity is seldom associated with
restlessness and irritability of mind. To excel in some handicraft not
only bespeaks the possession of self-control, it helps directly to
cultivate it. The teaching of Froebel and Montessori holds good after
nursery days are over.


MENTAL TRAINING

Mental training enables the child to retain facts in his memory, to
obtain information from as many sources as possible, to understand and
piece them together, and finally to reach fresh conclusions from
previously acquired data. So far as is possible the teacher must
satisfy the natural desire to know the reason of things. It must be
his endeavour to prevent the child from accepting any argument which
he has not fully understood, and which, as a result, he is able not to