These, of course, are the crude and simple lines upon which the finer and more complex evolution of the endocrine problems of the school child will build.  The fine art of education itself is crude and gross and simple compared with what it might be, even as a beginning.  The science of education has yet to begin, as the offspring of that science of the future, to which knowledge of the internal secretions will contribute no little, the science of puericulture.

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

It is difficult, indeed, to avoid becoming merely enthusiastic upon the possibilities of the applications of the endocrines to the educational domain.  Happiness for the average individual consists of a double success—­success in his vocation (chosen or forced upon him) and success in his sex life.  A certain hue and cry has been raised in the last few years concerning the vast and overwhelming importance of sex in the happiness and even in the successes of a man’s everyday life.  And no doubt there is a relation.  Sublimation plays its part in the explanation of vocational idiosyncrasies.  The fact, however, that perfect success in sex may occur with absolute failure in the career, however, splits the problem for good into its realities:  a physiologic aspect as well as a psychologic.

So, as school education will have to take serious account of endocrine anomalies and possibilities, will the institution which selects and trains for a career.  Vocational misfits have aroused the ardor of our efficiency experts.  And again, the sweeping psychological attack has beaten its head against the stonewall of ignorance of constitutional predispositions and tendencies of material.  The attempt to erect psychologic types for vocational selections could never make much headway because it could only flounder in a swamp of metaphors, product of the vices of its methods.  Not that anyone would wish to discard at all the psychologic mode of approach.  But no science, in the sense of accurate examination, was possible, in the matter of classification for vocation, without the insight into the physiology of the candidate that the analysis of his endocrine formula will provide.

One need not dilate upon the value of such an examination.  Civilization has not yet learned how to pick its personnel.  And so artists and scientists, philosophers and politicians, financiers and religious leaders, arise and survive by the operation of the laws of probabilities and chances, rather than by any intelligent selection and cultivation of material.  The case, indeed, is simply a subdivision of the vast subject:  haphazard muddle in the conduct of life.  A cry has been raised for the superman, and a cry has been raised for a method of anthropometry.  For the lack of these two, it has been said, all governments have been doomed to defeat.  The study of the endocrines will by no means supply a panacea.  But as it will furnish a means of approach to the determination of how men and women are built, and why they are built differently, no one can gainsay the tremendous advantages to the nation that will proceed to classify its population accordingly, and know its strength and weakness in terms of the actual generators of success and failure.