Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene | Page 6

mentality."[3]
The degree of approximation to human intelligence in anthropoid
animals follows very closely the degree of approximation to human
movements.
The gradual acquirement of the erect position by the human infant
admirably repeats this long phylogenetic evolution.[4] At first the limbs
are of almost no use in locomotion, but the fundamental trunk muscles
with those that move the large joints are more or less spasmodically
active. Then comes creeping, with use of the hip muscles, while all
below the knee is useless, as also are the fingers. Slowly the leg and
foot are degraded to locomotion, slowly the great toe becomes more
limited in its action, the thumb increases in flexibility and strength of
opposition, and the fingers grow more mobile and controllable. As the
body slowly assumes the vertical attitude, the form of the chest changes
till its greatest diameter is transverse instead of from front to back. The
shoulder-blades are less parallel than in quadrupeds, and spread out till
they approximate the same plane. This gives the arm freedom of
movement laterally, so that it can be rotated one hundred and eighty
degrees in man as contrasted to one hundred degrees in apes, thus
giving man the command of almost any point within a sphere of which
the two arms are radii. The power of grasping was partly developed
from and partly added to the old locomotor function of the fore limbs;

the jerky aimless automatisms, as well as the slow rhythmic flexion and
extension of the fingers and hand, movements which are perhaps
survivals of arboreal or of even earlier aquatic life, are coördinated; and
the bilateral and simultaneous rhythmic movements of the heavier
muscles are supplemented by the more finely adjusted and specialized
activities which as the end of the growth period is approached are
determined less by heredity and more by environment. In a sense, a
child or a man is the sum total of his movements or tendencies to move;
and nature and instinct chiefly determine the basal, and education the
accessory parts of our activities.
The entire accessory system is thus of vital importance for the
development of all of the arts of expression. These smaller muscles
might almost be called organs of thought. Their tension is modified
with the faintest change of soul, such as is seen in accent, inflection,
facial expressions, handwriting, and many forms of so-called
mind-reading, which, in fact, is always muscle-reading. The
day-laborer of low intelligence, with a practical vocabulary of not over
five hundred words, who can hardly move each of his fingers without
moving others or all of them, who can not move his brows or corrugate
his forehead at will, and whose inflection is very monotonous,
illustrates a condition of arrest or atrophy of this later, finer, accessory
system of muscles. On the other hand, the child, precocious in any or
all of these later respects, is very liable to be undeveloped in the larger
and more fundamental parts and functions. The full unfoldment of each
is, in fact, an inexorable condition precedent for the normal
development to full and abiding maturity of the higher and more
refined muscularity, just as conversely the awkwardness and
clumsiness of adolescence mark a temporary loss of balance in the
opposite direction. If this general conception be correct, then nature
does not finish the basis of her pyramid in the way Ross, Mercier, and
others have assumed, but lays a part of the foundation and, after
carrying it to an apex, normally goes back and adds to the foundation to
carry up the apex still higher and, if prevented from so doing, expends
her energy in building the apex up at a sharper angle till instability
results. School and kindergarten often lay a disproportionate strain on
the tiny accessory muscles, weighing altogether but a few ounces, that

wag the tongue, move the pen, and do fine work requiring accuracy.
But still at this stage prolonged work requiring great accuracy is
irksome and brings dangers homologous to those caused by too much
fine work in the kindergarten before the first adjustment of large to
small muscles, which lasts until adolescence, is established. Then
disproportion between function and growth often causes symptoms of
chorea. The chief danger is arrest of the development and control of the
smaller muscles. Many occupations and forms of athletics, on the
contrary, place the stress mainly upon groups of fundamental muscles
to the neglect of finer motor possibilities. Some who excel in heavy
athletics no doubt coarsen their motor reactions, become not only
inexact and heavy but unresponsive to finer stimuli, as if the large
muscles were hypertrophied and the small ones arrested. On the other
hand, many young men, and probably more young women, expend too
little of their available active energy upon basal and massive