age, while the survivors born in 1895 (the year of the highest death-rate of infants) were the weakest.
It would appear therefore that the children born in certain years have a harder fight for life, and that those who survive are less healthy and strong than are children born in other years. There is, however, no year that does not see a prodigious slaughter of the innocents. And there is no year, therefore, in which the children who survive are not severely handicapped through disease.
Disease, then, plays a great part in school life today. Not only the diseases that are infectious, but also others. Not only present diseases, but diseases that are supposed to be over and done with. And what is the effect of it all on children as learners? It appears that some kinds of disease and deformity do not hinder the development of the brain. There are few dwarfs who are inferior to other people in intelligence—not a few have been famous men—such, for example, as Æsop, and Pope. And some kinds of disease stimulate brain cells, as Dr. Kerr points out—more especially in its active stages—as, for example, when a servant girl in delirium remembers the Greek or Latin she has heard read.
Dr. Arkell, of Liverpool, points out that starvation has a strangely stimulating effect on the nervous
