Professor Treichler has delivered a lecture before the German Association
of Naturalists and Physicians which contains a fact of some interest to teachers. He says that headache in schools decidedly increases, until in some schools, and notably in Nuremberg, one-third of the scholars suffer from it. He believes that the cause is over intellectual exertion, caused partly by the adoption of too many subjects, but principally by the tendency to demand night-work. The brain is then freshly taxed when its cells are exhausted. We begin to hear the same complaint in England, especially from London schools, and are tempted to believe that in some of them an imperceptible but steady increase in the amount of night-work demanded has been going on, which is passing a safe limit. It does not hurt the quick, and it does not hurt the stupid, but it does hurt the boys and girls who want to fulfil all demands, and have not quite the quickness to do it. The usual quantity of Latin, for example, to be learned at night has within the last thirty years more than doubled, while the pressure from parents upon the children to learn it all has increased in nearly the same pro.. portion. The increased crowding of schools explains much, but it does not explain this headache, which is not suffered by the boys in proportion to their ill-health.
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