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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/225

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MENTAL AND PHYSICAL TRAINING OF CHILDREN.
213

men because they dread as the greatest calamity to be cast into the hands of Giant Doubting, who to them is but another name for Giant Despair. But the path of Doubt leads to the portal of Truth.

It has been no part of my purpose in this address to impugn the character of the books of the Old Testament. On the contrary, I regard that noble work as the most important anthropologic record possessed by man—a work which richly repays the most diligent study. I gladly accept it as a genuine record, and believe that, though it has been colored by time and by the work of designing men, it was never invented. It is sometimes said that persons who are absorbed in scientific studies fear or pretend to scorn the Bible. I neither fear nor scorn it. I admire it, and study it, and gain much from it; but no intelligent person takes as of the same authority all its versions, or, indeed, all the contents of the books which are arbitrarily styled canonical, and about the very names and numbers of which scholars, churches, and sects dispute.

The Hexateuch contains that intrinsic evidence of truth which so impressed the Ojibwa elders, before mentioned, who said that the work was true because they and their fathers "had heard the same stories since the world was new." To those who can read it understandingly it is a true story of a plane of culture.

"Now as to myself I have so described these matters as I have found them and read them; but, if any one is inclined to another opinion about them, let him enjoy his different sentiments without any blame from me."

[Concluded.]

MENTAL AND PHYSICAL TRAINING OF CHILDREN.

By JESSIE ORIANA WALLER.

I.

MY paper is entitled the "Mental and Physical Training of Children," and I shall begin with remarks on physical training, as it is first in natural order, the physical life beginning before the mental. In these days, when there is a great rage for education, a certain top-heaviness has been produced among children, and the good homely helpmate of the mind—the body—is decidedly neglected. It is looked upon as is the dull but sensible wife of some clever man, whose duty is to get through all the home drudgery. She must be invited out with him, but is ignored in society, and is only tolerated on account of her brilliant husband. Now, I consider the body to be just as important as the mind, and that it ought to be treated with just as much respect,