activity and that which is simply unnecessary tension, is not
difficult to discern when our eyes are well opened to superfluous
effort. This misdirected force seems to be the secret of much of the
overwork in schools, and the consequent physical break-down of
school children, especially girls. It is not that they have too much
to do, it is that they do not know how to study naturally, and with
the real concentration which learns the lesson most quickly, most
surely, and with the least amount of effort. They study a lesson
with all the muscles of the body when only the brain is needed, with
a running accompaniment of worry for fear it will not be learned.

Girls can be, have been, trained out of worrying about their
lessons. Nervous strain is often extreme in students, from
lesson-worry alone; and indeed in many cases it is the worry that
tires and brings illness, and not the study. Worry is brain tension.
It is partly a vague, unformed sense that work is not being done in
the best way which makes the pressure more than it need be; and
instead of quietly studying to work to better advantage, the worrier
allows herself to get more and more oppressed by her anxieties,--as
we have seen a child grow cross over a snarl of twine which, with
very little patience, might be easily unravelled, but in which, in
the child's nervous annoyance, every knot is pulled tighter. Perhaps
we ought hardly to expect as much from the worried student as from
the child, because the ideas of how to study arc so vague that they
seldom bring a realization of the fact that there might be an
improvement in the way of studying.

This possible improvement may be easily shown. I have taken a girl
inclined to the mistaken way of working, asked her to lie on the
floor where she could give up entirely to the force of