Persistence of youth or juvenility may be manufactured by nature in two ways.  There may be a persistence of early glandular predominances.  We have seen what happens to the thymocentric.  That a pineal-centered juvenile or infantile type exists may be safely predicted.  Nature’s only other mode of securing perpetual youth seems to be by prolonging the time allotted to the sex gland crescendo.

As for the golden age of maturity itself, what humdrum people and poets have despised as middle age, the margin of reserve of the ruling hormone is a quantity almost malleable in our hands, but still to be regarded with respect as a hard cold proposition by the physiologist.  In general, the continuance of any stage of development means the maintaining of the glandular administration peculiar to it.  So the chubby debonair irresponsible whom nothing can touch is happy in the possession of a pineal uncorrupted by the years, while the genius who can turn out his best work at sixty-five must thank his pituitary for standing by him to the end.

THE SCIENCE OF PUERICULTURE

There is a specialty now growing in the womb of science which in its own good time will come to fruition as the study of the child’s needs or puericulture.  Even today there exists a scientific basis for the formulation of the principles upon which every child should be brought up.  Though we have had marvelous results from the campaigns to lower infantile mortality, most of what has been done has been medical in its interest, and so largely negative in its accomplishments.  The removal of the causes of evil no doubt gives the good its opportunity.  But how to raise a child, endowed with satisfactory ancestral stuff, as a Grade A normal or supernormal, still remains to be erected into an exact science.

A number of attempts have been abortive in this field.  Why they have failed to arouse the ardor of the parent has puzzled some of the pioneers.  Child-culture as the foundation of all systems of education has continued more or less of a hope rather than an achievement because of a lack of appreciation of the different constitutional varieties of children.  A certain amount of attention has been lavished upon children needing special attention, those mainly suffering from insufficient development of one sort or another.  In the last decade or so, an endeavour to focus upon the exceptional child, exceptional in intelligence or some special creative endowment, has started an interesting movement.  All of them have suffered from the fallacies and troubles of the pure psychologist who would handle mind as an entity in a vacuum.

A realization of the different physical and psychic educational needs of various children will arrive only when we see them as built differently.  Just as shoddy and silk, cotton and wool, alone or in combination, all possess different qualities as wearing material, so different children have varying capacities for the wear and tear of education.  The endocrine classification of the human race, applied to children, will here yield a harvest to the educator and to the country.  Nothing is more evident than the diversified nature of the needs of the various internal secretion types, once they are realized as such.