Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene | Page 7

muscle
work, and cultivate too much, and above all too early, the delicate
responsive work. This is, perhaps, the best physiological
characterization of precocity and issues in excessive nervous and
muscular irritability. The great influx of muscular vigor that unfolds
during adolescent years and which was originally not only necessary to
successful propagation, but expressive of virility, seems to be a very
plastic quantity, so that motor regimen and exercise at this stage is
probably more important and all-conditioning for mentality, sexuality,
and health than at any other period of life. Intensity, and for a time a
spurty diathesis, is as instinctive and desirable as are the copious minor
automatisms which spontaneously give the alphabet out of which
complex and finer motor series are later spelled by the conscious will.
Mercier and others have pointed out that, as most skilled labor, so
school work and modern activities in civilized life generally lay
premature and disproportionate strains upon those kinds of movement
requiring exactness. Stress upon basal movements is not only
compensating but is of higher therapeutic value against the disorders of
the accessory system; it constitutes the best core or prophylactic for
fidgets and tense states, and directly develops poise, control, and
psycho-physical equilibrium. Even when contractions reach choreic
intensity the best treatment is to throw activities down the scale that
measures the difference between primary and secondary movements

and to make the former predominate.
The number of movements, the frequency with which they are repeated,
their diversity, the number of combinations, and their total kinetic
quantum in young children, whether we consider movements of the
body as a whole, fundamental movements of large limbs, or finer
accessory motions, is amazing. Nearly every external stimulus is
answered by a motor response. Dresslar[5] observed a thirteen months'
old baby for four hours, and found, to follow Preyer's classification,
impulsive or spontaneous, reflex, instinctive, imitative, inhibitive,
expressive, and even deliberative movements, with marked satisfaction
in rhythm, attempts to do almost anything which appealed to him, and
almost inexhaustible efferent resources. A friend has tried to record
every word uttered by a four-year-old girl during a portion of a day,
and finds nothing less than verbigerations. A teacher noted the
activities of a fourteen-year-old boy during the study time of a single
school day[6], with similar results.
Lindley[7] studied 897 common motor automatisms in children, which
he divided into 92 classes: 45 in the region of the head, 20 in the feet
and legs, 19 in the hands and fingers. Arranged in the order of
frequency with which each was found, the list stood as follows: fingers,
feet, lips, tongue, head, body, hands, mouth, eyes, jaws, legs, forehead,
face, arms, ears. In the last five alone adolescents exceeded children,
the latter excelling the former most in those of head, mouth, legs, and
tongue, in this order. The writer believes that there are many more
automatisms than appeared in his returns.
School life, especially in the lower grades, is a rich field for the study
of these activities. They are familiar, as licking things, clicking with the
tongue, grinding the teeth, scratching, tapping, twirling a lock of hair or
chewing it, biting the nails (Bérillon's onychophagia), shrugging,
corrugating, pulling buttons or twisting garments, strings, etc., twirling
pencils, thumbs, rotating, nodding and shaking the head, squinting and
winking, swaying, pouting and grimacing, scraping the floor, rubbing
hands, stroking, patting, flicking the fingers, wagging, snapping the
fingers, muffling, squinting, picking the face, interlacing the fingers,

cracking the joints, finger plays, biting and nibbling, trotting the leg,
sucking things, etc.
The average number of automatisms per 100 persons Smith found to be
in children 176, in adolescents 110. Swaying is chiefly with children;
playing and drumming with the fingers is more common among
adolescents; the movements of fingers and feet decline little with age,
and those of eyes and forehead increase, which is significant for the
development of attention. Girls excel greatly in swaying, and also,
although less, in finger automatism; and boys lead in movements of
tongue, feet, and hands. Such movements increase, with too much
sitting, intensity of effort, such as to fix attention, and vary with the
nature of the activity willed, but involve few muscles directly used in a
given task. They increase up the kindergarten grades and fall off
rapidly in the primary grades; are greater with tasks requiring fine and
exact movements than with those involving large movements.
Automatisms are often a sign of the difficulty of tasks. The restlessness
that they often express is one of the commonest signs of fatigue. They
are mostly in the accessory muscles, while those of the fundamental
muscles (body, legs, and arms) disappear rapidly with age; those of eye,
brow, and jaw show greatest increase with age, but their frequency in
general declines with growing maturity,