Such people have very fine hair and fine skin. Their nerves are sensitive and close to the surface. Their entire build of body is delicate and slender. Their hands and feet also are usually delicately and slenderly fashioned; their shoulders are narrow and oftentimes sloping. It is folly to talk of building up rugged, muscular and bony systems by means of strenuous exercise in people thus endowed. Much, of course, can
be done to strengthen and harden the muscles, but they are frail physically, by nature, and can never be anything else.
VOCATIONS FOR THE PHYSICALLY FRAIL
People with this type of organization are not inclined to be skillful with their fingers. They do not care for physical work of any kind; they do not take an interest in it and, therefore, cannot do it well. Properly trained, men and women of this type take their place in the professions. They are teachers, preachers, lawyers, educators, reformers, inventors, authors, and artists. Among those of mediocre abilities we find clerks, secretaries, accountants, salesmen, window trimmers, decorators, advertisers, and others working along similar mental lines. When such people are not trained and educated, they are misfits always, because they do not have opportunities to use to their fullest extent the natural intellectual talents with which they have been endowed.
THE MENTALLY MECHANICAL
There is a type of boy who is oftentimes thrown into the wrong vocation in life, owing to a lack of appreciation of his true abilities on the part of parents or teachers. This boy has a large head and small body, and is intensely interested in machinery. He probably learns to handle tools, after a fashion, at a very early age; spends his spare time in machine shops; is intensely interested in locomotives and steamships, and otherwise manifests a passion for machinery and mechanics. Oftentimes, on account of this, he is very early apprenticed to a mechanic or is given a job in some place where he will have an opportunity to build, operate or repair machinery.
Some years ago we visited in a family in which there was a boy of this type. At that time his chief interest was in locomotives. He had a toy locomotive and took the greatest delight in operating it. Whenever he went near a railroad station he improved every opportunity to examine carefully the parts of a locomotive and, if possible, to induce the
engineer to take him up into the cab and show him the levers, valves and other parts to be seen there. As soon as he was old enough, he begged his father to be permitted to go to work in a railroad shop. Fortunately, however, his father was too intelligent and too sensible to be misled by mere surface indications. The boy was encouraged to finish his education. Being a bright, capable youngster, he learned readily and rapidly. By means of proper educational methods, giving him plenty of opportunity for the exercise of his mechanical activities, he was induced to remain in school until he secured an excellent college education. As he grew older his interest in machinery did not wane. He found, however, that it was becoming almost wholly intellectual. He lost all desire to handle, build, operate or repair machinery. When, in later life, he became the owner of an automobile, he was more than willing to leave all of the details of its care to his chauffeur and mechanician.
As he cultivated his mental powers, he became more and more interested in the use of his constructive aptitudes in the formation of ideas. He liked to put ideas together; to work out the mechanics of expression in writing. Instead of building machinery, he loved to build plots. Instead of operating machinery, his abilities turned in the direction of working out the technique of literary expression. Instead of repairing machinery he loved rather to revise and rewrite his stories and plays. In other words, the constructive talent, which he had shown as a child in material mechanics, turned in the direction of mental and intellectual construction as he grew older.
COMMERCIAL CONSTRUCTIVENESS