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LABOUR AND CHILDHOOD

assured of their position, some of these doctors are looking further ahead and turning their thoughts to education itself as a physiological process. They were bound, of course, to come to this. No one, who deals with living things, can be thinking always of disease. The wild flowers are healthy enough. They fade quickly. The cultivated flower, the cultivated brain, has greater resources. It has its secrets to-day, its secret risks, its secret evils, its secret store of wealth. It is very interesting. Even the school doctor of Germany, moving about in schools every day, must have become conscious of all this. He too has become conscious of great events taking place as a result of the teaching given in the schools. The lesson, at which at first he was an intruder, must have begun, sooner or later, to have some interest for him. He was preparing all the while to see things that were dark to Froebel. He divined, too, that in upper schools there were secrets of life into whose heart he might glance as the varied appeal and labour of school life awakened new powers of response. And now he is at the gate of the fields into which his English confrères have broken like children who, not being allowed to go into the garden, have consoled themselves by getting into the orchard.