derelict, she took him to the University of Pennsylvania's psychological clinic to have a scientific investigation made of his mental state. The tests there applied made it evident that his intellectual retardation was largely due to unsuspected deafness, and that this in turn was associated with adenoid growths in the post-nasal cavity. Three days later the adenoids were removed, and almost immediately an improvement was noticed in both his mental condition and his behavior. So marked, indeed, was the change for the better that the director of the clinic, Professor Lightner Witmer, in reporting the case, felt justified in declaring:

"Under proper psychological direction and medical treatment, the whole life prospects of this boy had completely changed within a fortnight from intellectual and social hopelessness to a promise of usefulness and good citizenship."

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On another occasion there was brought to Professor Witmer an eleven-year-old boy of good family who had been pronounced by several New York specialists 'mentally defective" and "certain to prove unmanageable.” His father reported that he was unable to do correctly simple sums in addition and subtraction, and could not read a single sentence with out making a number of mistakes. Also, that he was cowardly, bad-tempered, and quarrelsome.

Altogether the statements made concerning him seemed to stamp him as a fit subject for institutional care; but Professor Witmer's tests indicated that naturally the boy was bright enough, and he began to suspect that his backwardness and misconduct might be the result partly of injudicious upbringing and partly of adenoids or some other source of nervous irritation. A thorough physical examination was consequently ordered, and this revealed the presence of marked, but readily curable, eye trouble. Given suitable spectacles and a few months of special training in the hospital school connected with the psychological clinic, the whilom "feebleminded" child not only made good headway when placed in a regular public school, but also showed a surprising moral improvement.

Even diseases of the teeth may play no small part in the making of the wayward boy. In this connection perhaps the most

remarkable case that has recently come to my knowledge concerns a Cleveland youth who, up to the age of sixteen, had been a model of good conduct. Then, having gone through high school and begun work with a business firm, he suddenly developed thieving tendencies, finally breaking into a post-office, an exploit which earned for him a term in a reformatory. This was so far from curing him that soon after his release he adventured into highway robbery, was caught, and was sent to jail.

So sudden and startling had been the change in his behavior that the Cleveland police authorities were convinced he was not responsible for his actions, and advised his mother to have him committed to an asylum for the insane. Before taking this extreme step she had him examined by a skilled neurologist, Dr. Henry S. Upson, whose careful testing of the boy failed to disclose any signs of organic brain trouble. Dr. Upson noticed, however, that his teeth were badly decayed, and this led him to suggest an X-ray examination, as a result of which it was discovered that the youthful criminal was suffering from several abscessed and impacted teeth.

Following an operation for their removal, there was a steady improvement in his moral as well as in his physical health. When his term of imprisonment was at an end, he found work in a printing-shop, and at last accounts, a year after the operation, had won for himself the reputation of being "quiet and industrious, self-controlled, and without any indication of either moral or mental aberration."

In a single institution-the New York Juvenile Asylum-it was found last year that the degeneracy of twenty per cent. of a group of fifty "bad boys," who were mentally as well as morally backward, was due in great measure to similar trivial physical defects, adenoids, enlarged glands, eye and ear troubles, etc. Not so very long ago these boys, like the boys in the individual instances mentioned, would have been deemed the hopeless victims of a bad heredity. It is therefore fair to assume that in time to come other remediable, but as yet unsuspected, physical causes of imperfect mental and moral functioning will be discovered.

This is not to say, though, that in such cases medication or the surgeon's knife will prove all-sufficient to prevent the

transition from "naughtiness" into outright vice and crime. To this end good moral training will still be the indispensable safeguard, and particularly the moral training to be had through the subtle influence of a good home and good associates. Surely as, for example, the results of the activities of the New York Children's Aid Society strongly suggest, the home and the companions of youth are the chief determinants of character. As has been so well said by Dr. Paul Dubois, the eminent Swiss physician and philosopher:

If you have the happiness to be a wellliving man, take care not to attribute the credit of it to yourself. Remember the favorable conditions in which you have lived, surrounded by relatives who loved you and set you a good example; do not forget the close friends who have taken you by the hand and led you away from the quagmires of evil; keep a grateful remembrance for all the teachers who have influenced you, the kind and intelligent schoolmaster, the devoted pastor; realize all these multiple influences which have made of you what you are. Then you will remember that such and such a culprit has not in his sad life met with these favorable conditions, that he had a drunken father or a foolish mother, and that he has lived without affection, exposed to all kinds of temptation. You will then take pity upon this disinherited man, whose mind has been nourished upon malformed mental images, begetting evil sentiments such as immoderate desire or social hatred.

And it is not only the homeless, deserted, or neglected child, allowed to run wild in the streets, drifting or forced into occupations which bring him more or less closely into touch with the ways and haunts of wrong-doing-it is not only this child who is likely in time to become a wrong-doer himself. No less than the neglected child is the "spoiled" one, how

ever good his heredity, apt to degenerate into delinquency, perhaps into criminality of the worst description. In short, to borrow Pascal's pregnant phrase, every child at the outset of his life is a little impulsive being, pushed indifferently toward good or evil according to the influences which surround him.

The blame, then, for the boy who goes wrong does not rest with the boy himself, or yet with his remote ancestors. It rests squarely with the parents who, through ignorance or neglect, have failed to mold him aright in the plastic days of childhood. What is needed, especially in this complex civilization of ours, with its myriad incitements and temptations, is a livelier appreciation of the responsibilities as well as the privileges of parenthood. Most of all, perhaps, from the point of view of coping with the problem of vice and crime, do parents need to appreciate that it is in the very first years of their children's lives that the work of character-building should be begun.

The whole family life, accordingly, should be regulated with a view to "suggesting" into the infant mind ideas which, taking root there, will eventually blossom. into habits of right thinking and right living. In their intercourse with one another, with all who pass within their doors, the parents should exhibit only those traits which they most desire to cultivate in their child-such traits as kindliness, courage, sympathy, geniality, courtesy, self-control. They should surround him with a material environment that will tend, again by the force of unconscious suggestion, to develop in him an appreciation for the good, the beautiful, and the true. Doing this, keeping close watch over his physical condition, and deftly guiding his intellectual interests to things worth while, they need have little fear that in after years he will be numbered among the world's delinquents.

[With lowered voice, he looks around warily.]

I am not always quite so modern.
At times at times, as when just now
You heard me pipe below this bough,
I slip my master's traces,

And slink by paths untrodden
To lovelorn, lush,
Arcadian places,

Where Philomel still lingers,
Plaining her ancient pity,
And there I fetch forth this
With idling fingers,

And pouting on its lip my kiss,

I pipe some dulcet, old, bucolic ditty. [He plays again, but breaks off abruptly.]

What if, through her as intermediary,
And after thousand ages of uncouth
Estrangement-what, I say, if we
Might find through her the key

To comprehend the native speech of birds,
And hold communion with them in our

human words?