§ 56. Physical Education, as it concerns the repairing, the motor, or the nervous, activities, is divided into (1) Dietetics, (2) Gymnastics, (3) Sexual Education. In real life these activities are scarcely separable, but for the sake of exposition we must consider them apart. In the regular development of the human being, moreover, the repairing system has a relative precedence to the motor system, and the latter to the sexual maturity. But Pedagogics can treat of these ideas only with reference to the infant, the child, and the youth.
FIRST CHAPTER.
Dietetics.
§ 57. Dietetics is the art of sustaining the normal repair of the organism. Since this organism is, in the concrete, an individual one, the general principles of dietetics must, in their manner of application, vary with the sex, the age, the temperament, the occupation, and the other conditions, of the individual. Pedagogics as a science can only go over its general principles, and these can be named briefly. It we attempt to speak of details, we fall easily into triviality. So very important to the whole life of man is the proper care of his physical nature during the first stages of its development, that the science of Pedagogics must not omit to consider the different systems which different people, according to their time, locality, and culture, have made for themselves; many, it is true, embracing some preposterous ideas, but in general never devoid of justification in their time.
§ 58. The infant's first nourishment must be the milk of its mother. The substitution of a nurse should be only an exception justified alone by the illness of the mother; as a rule, as happens in France, it is simply bad, because a foreign physical and moral element is introduced into the family through the nurse. The milk of an animal can never be as good for a child.
§ 59. When the teeth appear, the child is first able to eat solid food; but, until the second teeth come, he should be fed principally on light, fluid nourishment, and on vegetable diet.
§ 60. When the second teeth are fully formed, the human being is ready for animal as well as vegetable food. Too much meat is not good; but it is an anatomical error to suppose that man, by the structure of his stomach, was originally formed to live alone on vegetable diet, and that animal food is a sign of his degeneracy.
—The Hindoos, who subsist principally on vegetable diet, are not, as has been often asserted, a very gentle race: a glance into their history, or into their erotic poetry, shows them to be quite as passionate as other peoples.—
§ 61. Man is omnivorous. Children have therefore a natural desire to taste of everything. For them eating and drinking possess a kind of poetry; there is a theoretic ingredient blended with the material enjoyment. They have, on this account, a proneness to indulge, which is deserving of punishment only when it is combined with disobedience and secrecy, or when it betrays cunning and greediness.
§ 62. Children need much sleep, because they are undergoing the most active progressive metamorphosis. In after-life sleep and waking should be subjected to periodical regulation, but not too exactly.