A list of the philosophical and psychological articles (more than 500 in number) in the Britannica will be found in the Index (Vol. 29, p. 939) and it is not repeated here.
Part III
Devoted to the Interests of Children
CHAPTER LXI
FOR PARENTS
The Science of Rearing Children
The new Encyclopaedia Britannica is full of encouragement for parents who are tempted to feel that the proper care and training of a child require almost superhuman skill and energy. Many of the fears and doubts by which they are beset rest upon vague traditions, handed down from a day when a child’s health was threatened by more dangers and greater dangers than now, and when much less was known than is known to-day about the training of a child. Statistics are dull things, as a rule, but it would be difficult to find pleasanter reading than the statistical tables which show how much the modern progress of science has done for children. And these figures, in many Britannica articles on various diseases and localities, by showing how much safer children’s lives are than they used to be, also indicate a decrease of children’s suffering and an increase of children’s happiness which cannot be expressed in numbers. Sheer ignorance caused much of the pain that children used to suffer and also much of the neglect that led to bodily and mental deficiency in later life. There is still room for improvement; but it is no exaggeration to say that the child of the average American mechanic is more intelligently cared for than was, a hundred years ago, the heir to a European kingdom.
Every branch of science has contributed to these improved conditions. Medical and surgical research have no doubt been the great factors, as disease and deformity were the worst evils; but the child’s mind has been as carefully studied as its body. Here, again, figures cannot tell the whole story. They can show the universal benefits of our public school system, but they cannot show how greatly the children of well-read and thoughtful parents benefit by home influences intelligently exerted. That element of education begins as soon as a child is born, and it is based upon such observation of its individual needs as only a parent’s affection and sympathy can achieve. And in this part of the parent’s task, as in the case of the child’s health, it is essential to be guided by specialists of the highest authority, such as those who wrote for the Britannica the articles of which a brief account is given in this chapter.
The child’s individuality, physical and mental, is largely inherited.
What is Known about Heredity
The vast subject of heredity has indeed not yet been reduced to an exact science, but the newest theories advanced by Weismann, Hertwig, and others, with such confirmation as has already been obtained, are clearly set forth in Dr. P. Chalmers Mitchell’s article Heredity (Vol. 13, p. 350). As for our knowledge of the physiological process of heredity, the foundation may be said to have been laid by the labours of the Austrian monk Mendel, and biologists are rapidly extending his work in various directions. What has been done in the past thirteen years since scientists rediscovered Mendel’s work is described in Mendelism (Vol. 18, p. 115), by R. C. Punnett, professor of biology, Cambridge University. There is no subject of greater interest or fascination before the world to-day, and there is no better or simpler introduction to it than Professor Punnett’s able article. As he says, “Increased knowledge of our heredity means increased power of control over the living thing.” We know very little as yet, but that little “offers the hope of a great extension at no very distant time. If this hope is borne out, if it is shown that the qualities of man, his body and his intellect, his immunities and his diseases, even his very virtues and vices, are dependent upon the ascertainable presence or absence of definite unit-characters whose mode of transmission follows fixed laws, and if also man decides that his life shall be ordered in the light of this knowledge, it is obvious that the social system will have to undergo considerable changes.”
The relations between parent and offspring are also dealt with in Reproduction (Vol. 23, p. 116), by Dr. Mitchell; and those who wish to study the development of the organism will find such information in Embryology (Vol. 9, p. 314), by Adam Sedgwick, who is professor of zoology at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London. This masterly account is supplemented by a section (p. 329) on the Physiology of Development by Dr. Hans A. E. Driesch, of Heidelberg University.