reading than now. Most of us can remember how eagerly we awaited the weekly arrival of the Youth's Companion, or how we pored over Henty and Alger and Oliver Optic. What woman can forget her girlhood's delight in Louisa Alcott and the Elsie books?

The teacher could ask for no better opportunity than is afforded by this insatiable demand of later childhood for something to read. And it is, like all times of opportunity, a critical point in the development of personality. The boy may easily acquire a taste for the "dime novel" of impossible adventure and hair-breadth escape, the girl for mawkish romance; and they grow into the man or woman who can enjoy nothing but highly-spiced and frothy fiction. On the other hand, children who are given books too serious may lose entirely the desire to read, and become those pitiable beings-men who never read, except the newspaper, and women whose only literature is in the oral form of gossip. Give a boy "goody-goody" books-the typical Sunday school library books of a few years ago— and you may turn him, not only against reading, but against religion itself.

We make a mistake if we treat the child's reading either as a mere amusement or as a sugar-coat for a moral. To the end of life, the love of good literature remains one of its mightiest spiritual forces. The child must learn to love the best. It is as important that you guide him to great fiction and poetry, to well-written biography and history, as that you teach him Bible verses. It is better to co-operate with the town library than to attempt to provide a Sunday school library, because of the wider resources the public institution is apt to afford. It is your privilege to put your pupil in touch with the literary heritage of the race. Pick things that he can comprehend; but do not be afraid of the best. "Periods which no master has described, whose spirit no poet breathes," says Herbart, "are of little value to education." Books of real insight into life and of genuine literary value, books of .truth caught by the imagination and felt within, will grip the minds and hearts of children as they do our own.

6. Habits are more easily formed in this period than at any other time of life, and are more lasting. A multitude of brain cells are just maturing. Impressions are easy, and connections between cells quickly established. Every boy knows that if he is ever to become a great baseball player he must begin now. Later he will not be plastic enough to get the finer knack of the man who "handles himself as if he were born to it."

It follows that memory is best in these years, for memory, as we

shall see, is after all a kind of habit. It is the time for drill work in school. Repetition will now fix anything in the mind, whether it be understood or not, and many a glib answer will deceive us into thinking that the pupil has really grasped our teaching. The boy will learn his daily lessons word for word with only a couple of readings, keep them until the recitation is over and then let them go forever. If he is ever to learn a foreign language, better now than later, for he will soon be able to use it easily and naturally, while there will always be some little hesitancy or artificiality about the speech that he learns in later years. This is the time to learn Bible verses, the shorter psalms, and whatever else should be laid up in the mind word for word. If you keep these tasks within reason, you need hardly fear repelling your pupil. Most boys and girls delight in them because they are so easy.

7. We shall see in the next chapter that there is a marked awakening of interest in religion at the end of this period and the beginning of early adolescence. The child is approaching life's decision time. We must keep this in mind throughout these years. We shall not attempt to hasten it: but we shall make ready. And if the child of eleven or twelve wants to make a public profession of his love for his Father and the Lord Jesus, we shall let him join the church. Happy the little one who has been so brought up that he has never known himself to be anything other than a child of God.

QUESTIONS

1. When does the average child make the transition from middle to later childhood?

2. Describe the growth and health of later childhood.

3. In what sense is it true that boys of this age are like primitive man?

4. How do the games of later childhood show that the social instincts are ripening?

5. What is the attitude of the sexes toward one another in this period?

6. What do you understand by the " gang instinct"? Tell something of Dr. Sheldon's study of clubs organized by boys and girls. 7. Show how public opinion enters life as a moral force during later childhood.

8. How should the teacher deal with "school-boy honor"?

9. Describe the hero-worship of later childhood. Can you remember any such hero-worship of your own? Tell something of it.

10. What opportunity does the "reading craze " of later childhood afford the teacher? What dangers does it involve?

II. What is meant by the statement that the nervous system is more plastic in later childhood than in any other time of life? What evidence is there for it?

12. When is a child's first definite awakening of interest in religion apt to occur? Is a child of eleven or twelve too young to be confirmed?

LESSON VI

EARLY ADOLESCENCE

There is a world of difference between twelve and thirteen, in the mind of boys and girls. They are all glad to enter upon the 'teens. It seems to mark a great step toward that goal of every child's ambition-being grown-up.

And they are not far wrong. The passage from childhood to adolescence is in fact life's greatest and most definite natural transition. Rooted in the development of new physical powers, it transforms the mental and spiritual life as well. It has been well called a new birth. It is the awakening of manhood and womanhood.

1. The term adolescence is applied to the whole period from this first awakening of new powers to their final ripening into young manhood and womanhood. Its boundaries cannot be exactly fixed. The age of puberty varies with different individuals, and is earlier for girls than for boys. It comes generally at thirteen or fourteen. The end of adolescence and the beginning of manhood and womanhood depends a great deal upon circumstances. The boy who must leave school early to go to work, the girl who must assume the responsibilities of a household, mature quickly. The complexity of modern life, on the other hand, and the elaborate education it demands, have lengthened adolescence. The end of the period comes more often at twenty-four or twenty-five than at twenty-one, which is the age recog nized by law.

For our purpose, however, it will be best to regard the thirteenth birthday as the beginning of adolescence, and the twenty-first as its end-simply because the Sunday school had best recognize those transitions which are definitely acknowledged as such by the pupil himself. No boy or girl in the 'teens likes to be classed with the children; and the young man or woman of twenty-one feels a right to all that the attainment of legal majority implies.

This period, again, may be divided at the seventeenth birthday. Early adolescence thus covers four years, ages thirteen to sixteen; and later adolescence, four years, ages seventeen to twenty.

2. Physically, early adolescence is a time of very rapid growth, both in height and weight. During the three years from the twelfth

birthday to the fifteenth, boys increase in weight 40 per cent and in height 14 per cent, while girls increase in weight 36 per cent and in height 10 per cent. At fifteen a boy has attained 92 per cent of his adult height and 76 per cent of his adult weight; girls have reached in height 97 per cent and in weight 90 per cent of their full growth. After seventeen girls almost cease to grow, and boys grow comparatively little, that mainly in weight.

The years of most rapid growth in height are the twelfth and thirteenth for girls, and the fourteenth and fifteenth for boys. In weight, girls grow most rapidly from the twelfth to the fifteenth years, boys from the thirteenth to the seventeenth. Girls are taller than boys from the twelfth to the fifteenth years, and heavier from the thirteenth to the fifteenth. After fifteen boys exceed both in height and weight. The most profound changes of these years, of course, are those connected with the development of the powers of sex.

This is a time of vigor and energy. While there is an increase in liability to sickness just before puberty, this declines again immediately after; and the power to resist disease remains high throughout the period. During just those years, in fact, when boys and girls approaching puberty are most apt to be sickly, they are least likely to die. In the last chapter we saw that the period from the tenth to the fifteenth birthday contains less deaths than any other five-year period. According to the census of 1900, the death rate for the registration area of the United States was 3.3 per thousand for the period from ten to fourteen, against 5.2 from five to nine, 5.2 from fifteen to nineteen, and 7.5 from twenty to twenty-four, with increasing rates for each succeeding period. Hartwell's tables, previously referred to, give a deathrate of 4.5 from ten to fourteen, opposed to 10.6 from five to nine, and 7.9 from fifteen to nineteen. For our own division into periods, his tables give the following death rates: middle childhood, 10.2; later childhood, 4.7; early adolescence, 5.5; later adolescence, 9.0.

3. Early adolescence is a time of expansion. Life widens in a hundred unexpected ways, and may take any one of them as its final direction. It is full of conflicting impulses, of contradictions and sur. prises. Through all, however, three fundamental characteristics stand out definitely: the expansion of selfhood, a new recognition of social values, and an emotional instability associated with the development of the sexual instincts.

4. The expansion of selfhood. It is now that the boy really begins to attain selfhood. He enters into the heritage of instincts and ideals, purposes and ambitions which is his birthright as a member of