=Positive science makes its appearance in the schools=.--Positive science was invited to enter into schools as into a chaos where it was necessary to separate light from darkness, a place of disaster where prompt succor was essential. * * * * * =Discoveries of medicine: distortions and diseases=.--The first science, indeed, to penetrate into the school was medicine, which organized a special hygiene for the occasion, a kind of Red Cross service. The most interesting part of the hygiene that penetrates into schools was that which diagnosed and described the "diseases of school children," that is to say, the maladies contracted solely as a result of study in school. The most prevalent of these maladies are spinal curvature and myopia. The first is caused by excessive sitting, and by the injurious position of the shoulders in writing. The second arises from the fact that in the spot where the child has to remain seated, there is not sufficient light for him to see clearly; or this spot is too far from the blackboard, or from the places where the child has to read, and the prolonged effort of accommodation induces myopia. Other minor generalized maladies were also described: an organic debility so widely diffused that hygiene prescribed as an ideal treatment a gratuitous distribution of cod-liver oil or of reconstituent remedies in general to all pupils. Anemia, liver complaints, and neurasthenia were also studied as school diseases. Thus a new field was opened to hygiene in connection with the most fertile source of professional disease, and reading and writing were carefully studied in relation to pedagogical methods, and in relation to spinal curvature and defective refraction of the eyes. The figure of the child, that victim of unsuitable and disproportionate work, was not hereby brought into strong relief, as might have been expected, by the aid of medicine, but a new branch of "legal medicine" came into being. It was, indeed, medicine which drew attention to the diseases and deaths of the victims in orphan asylums, victims of artificial or irrational feeding, in conjunction with wet nursing; it was medicine which passed in review one by one all those individual cases which proclaim this legal fact: children have no civil rights. Medicine now entered into another sphere where the victims were not "cases," but the generality, the child-population in its entirety; and now it is the law itself which imposes duties upon them, and condemns them _en masse_ to labor for many years in a manner which entails physical torture. If a branch of legal medicine has arisen in connection with criminals, how is it that none should ever have arisen in connection with the innocent? * * * * *