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THE CHILD-HAND TO-DAY
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mind, at all stages. He has to try to understand the mechanism involved in learning to read and to write, to draw and to dig, to read and to sing, to think and to reason; and above all he has to probe deep and even deeper into the secrets of progress and arrest.

Séguin, through his "defective" scholars, offered the first striking illustration that the brain is a transforming centre, that energy is not merely received there and travels there, but is changed as it travels. At different stations of this great "transformer" different degrees and forms of energy are worked up. At the outermost parts of the nervous systems some vibrations are quickly dispersed, and die away without waking any consciousness. Yet from first to last the nervous system is a conductor, a condenser, a transformer, and a detector. All the sensibility of the body is drained by it from the very outposts and is conducted along the nerve fibre as the electric fluid is conducted along the wires.

From fibre to fibre, as Luys has shown, from sensitive element to sensitive element our whole organism is sensitive, and the sum of feeling, rich or poor, that makes a sentient person, is conducted as a series of isolated currents into the