Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/55

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DISEASES AND THEIR CAUSES
29

tenance of normal health in dull organisms! But in Elmira the avowed aim is much bolder. And there is evidence that the treatment has the desired effect, for in many cases the dullard criminal, incapable of remorse at the time of entrance, begins later to show signs of pity and repentance. The stone melts. The heart becomes flesh. The life of the emotions is reached. The nearer goal—that of the sensory nature—is touched by methods that are partly mechanical.

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In the school such methods are believed to be unnecessary. And of course it is true that no average child needs the radical kind of sense training dealt out to hardened criminals. But a child has something to lose—and a great deal to gain—from the lower sensory standpoint. America has no health centres in the ordinary school, and her appeals to the subconscious are not much more deliberate than are our own in so far as the basal sense of general touch is concerned. But the education of the sense of smell is carried on in many schools. Teachers armed with odorous things, flowers, spices, gums, sweet-smelling woods, test the range of smell in each pupil and develop the attention power given to this sense.