More than two thousand years ago Aristotle pointed out that physical health was the basis of mental health, and the importance of a sound physical development as an essential condition of successful education. “First the body must be trained and _then_ the understanding,” declared the great Stagirite. The “new spirit” of modern education is admirably expressed in the Aristotelian maxim. This new spirit is a protest against the practice, futile from the standpoint of society, and brutal from the standpoint of the child, of attempting to educate hungry, physically weak, and ill-developed children who are unfitted to bear the strain and effort involved in the educational process. No one who has studied the matter at all can doubt that the physical deterioration which accompanies the impoverishment of the workers is of tremendous significance educationally. All the evidence gathered upon the subject in Europe and this country tends to the conclusion that physical weakness and underdevelopment account for a very large percentage of our educational failures. The studies of Porter, in St. Louis, Smedley and Christopher, in Chicago, and of Professor Beyer, who is perhaps our greatest authority, all tend to confirm the results of European investigations, that children of superior physique make the best pupils. Dull, backward pupils are generally inferior in physical development.[65] The number of dull and backward children in our public schools is so great that a study from this physiological point of view would seem to be quite as desirable and important as the many exhaustive and valuable psychological studies with which the literature of Child Study abounds. For many years special tutorial methods and institutions have existed for idiot and feeble-minded children and such other classes of distinctly defective children as epileptics, the blind, the deaf, and the dumb. But it is only in recent years that any effort has been made to deal with that far larger class of children distinguished equally from these distinctly defective classes and from normal, typical children. These pseudo-atypical children, as Dr. Groszmann terms them, are much more numerous than is generally supposed. Professor Monroe, of Stanford University, gathered particulars relating to 10,000 children in the public schools of California and found that 3 per cent of the children were feeble-minded and not less than 10 per cent backward and mentally dull, needing special care and attention.[66] These children who “skirt the borderland of abnormity” cannot properly be dealt with in the ordinary classes, and it has been found necessary in most cities to establish special classes for their benefit. While some of these classes have children whose backwardness is more apparent than real, the children of foreign immigrants, for example, whose difficulties with the language cause them to be placed in grades with much younger children,