eye.  After outdoor exercise and plenty of it, we should turn our attention to the home surroundings of our little ones.  The overheated rooms of the average American home I am sure have more to do with the growing tendency of weak eyes than we feel like admitting.  Look at these frail hot-house plants, and can any one believe that such bodies nourished in almost pestilential atmosphere can nourish such delicate organs of vision, and keep them ready for the enormous amount of work each little eye performs daily?  The brain developing so rapidly wills with an increasing rapidity the eye to do increasing duties; note the result—­a tendency to impoverished circulation first, and the eye with its power to give the brain a new picture in an infinitesimal short space of time means lightning-like circulation—­the eye must give way by its own exhaustion.

Civilization is the progenitor of many eye diseases.

After a boy has grown to that age when it becomes necessary for him to begin the education prescribed by the wise men, obstacles are placed in his way to aid again in causing deterioration of vision.  It is not so much the overcrowded condition of our school rooms as the enormous amount of work that causes deterioration of sight.  Our children begin their school life at a time when they are too young.  A child at six years of age who is forced to study all day or even a part of a day will not run the same race that one will who commences his studies at ten—­all things being equal.  The law prescribes that so much time must be devoted to study, so many forms must be passed, so many books must be read, so many pages of composition written—­all probably in badly lighted rooms, or by artificial light.  Note the effect.  First, possibly, distant vision gives way; the teacher, sympathizing with the overburdened child, tries to make the burden lighter by changing his position in the room or placing him under the cross light from a window; as the evil progresses, the child is taken to an ophthalmic surgeon, and the inevitable result, glasses, rightly called “crutches for the eyes,” are given.  What would be thought of a cause which would weaken the legs of that boy so that he would have to use crutches to carry him through life?  If civilization be responsible for an evil, let our efforts be put forth in finding a remedy for that evil.

A discussion, in a recent number of the British Medical Journal,[2] on “The Claims and Limitations of Physical Education in Schools,” has many valuable hints which should be followed by educators in this country.  Dr. Carter, in the leading paper on this subject, makes the pregnant remark:  “If the hope is entertained of building up a science of education, the medical profession must combine with the profession of teaching, in order to direct investigation and to collect material essential to generalization.  Without such co-operation educational workers must continue to flounder in the morasses of empiricism,