ABSTRACT
OF recent years, since our population has been moving from the more natural country life to take up its abode in cities, there has been a good deal of fear that not only a physical degeneration is taking place, especially among the very poor labouring classes, but that also a certain mental degeneracy is occurring in some of them. I do not refer to such decided mental changes as occur in insanity and idiocy. I understand that question is to be treated in a separate volume of this series. What I mean, is a certain narrowing of the mental horizon in the city-bred, a certain helplessness to cope with economic and social difficulties and a certain limitation of the general view of life which are seen in such persons, In childhood and youth they see little of Nature, with her many-sidedness, her infinite powers, her beauties and delights. They have not to look ahead and provide for the future and for seasonal changes as the countryman has. The weather and the sun and the moon have not to be watched and noted with a view to their practical effects on life. Things have not to be anticipated beforehand as the farmer and the gardener have to do. The unconsciously soothing effect of living in the midst of natural objects is not experienced. 263The street, the shop, the electric car, the factory bell and the policeman keep life going for many dwellers in the city without any thinking on their part. Not having had access to Nature in childhood they cannot take her up afterwards. There may be sharpness of mind, cunning and activity, but without this nature-experience there is an undoubted arrestive effect, which, continued generation after generation, contracts the mental habit as well as the mental vision. The hygiene for all this is simply to introduce as much of Nature into our large cities as is possible, which fortunately is being largely done, or go frequently to playgrounds with grass and flowers and trees. Parks, excursions to the country, pet animals at home, geraniums grown in window-boxes are more needed. Above all things, the abolition of those enemies of mankind, high tenement houses with children living four stories above the ground, should be striven after. A week's camping out in the year for every city school with an education in providing their own bread and milk and cooking their own food would supplement as a hygienic and a preventive of mental degeneracy the school lessons of domestic economy.
