At last positive studies on the school question have shed sufficient light to enable us to construct a new base for the old question. Is it well to allure children by a prize, to incite them to exhaust their nervous systems and injure their eyesight? And is it well to check them by means of punishments, when, urged by an overpowering instinct of self-preservation, they seek to avoid these perils? At last we all know that the prize-winners of the elementary schools are the mediocre pupils of the high school; that the prize-winners of the high school are the exhausted students of the academies; and that those who gain prizes throughout their school career are those who are most easily vanquished in the battle of life. Knowing this, is it well to stimulate on the one hand and to repress on the other, to the end that children may remain in this ruinous condition? Are not the perils of school life already serious enough, without adding stimuli to induce them to throw themselves into these perils with all their energies? A number of deeply interesting comparative studies have been made of late on clever and stupid school-children, those who gain prizes and those who incur punishment. Certain anthropologists, somewhat ingenious in matters of science, have studied the question in such good faith that they have even proposed to inquire whether the more brilliant prize-winners show evidences of morphological superiority, congenital marks of a natural privilege, a brain more highly developed than that of mediocrity. On the contrary, anthropological notes reveal their physical inferiority, i.e. their low stature and their remarkably narrow chest measurements. Their heads are in no way distinguished from those of less clever scholars; many of them wear spectacles. Thus we get a clearer picture of the life of a child who diligently performs all his tasks with a dread of making mistakes which may become positive anguish; who learns all his lessons, thus of necessity depriving himself of a walk, a saunter, an hour of rest. Obsessed by anxiety to be the first, or even stimulated by illusions of a future more brilliant than that of his companions, exhilarated by the praises and prizes which make him believe himself to be "one of the hopes of his country," and the "solace of his parents," he rushes forward to future impotence, as if dazed by a fairy vision. His careless companions, on the other hand, have well-developed chests, and are the merriest boys in the class.