The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-10-12
EDUCATING BABIES.

ington-Education by Machinery
 Babies That Can Turn Somersaults and Discriminate Colors-One Baby
 Boy Has to Endure Fifteen Hundred
 smells--New Senses Developed
 Touch, and Heat and Cold, Made Ed | ucational
 Two of Washingtons well-known sci- entists are rearing their babies accord ing to unique scientific methods, to the like of which no children in the world have ever been subjected. The sa- wants in question are psycho-physicist Elmer Gates, director of the new Labo- ratory of Psychology and Mind Art, and MT. William Dinwiddie, the gov ernment's photographer. Hear ing of the experiments in an incidental way, the writer recently visited the two gentlemen at their laboratories and persuaded them to divulge the in- teresting details of their methods, which have never before been made public.
 Prof. Gates is an experimenter in the new science of psyche physics, and is arranging in the suburbs of this city an elaborate laboratory in which he is installing many a complicated appara- tuS for measuring and altering the sen sations and emotions of man. His only child to whom the writer was present. ed, is a happy faced and pretty boy of
 sixteen months, whose blue eyes shine
 brighter than those of most children
 and whose well-formed head, en-
 wreathed in golden curls, is unusually
 developed for an infant of his size.
 The unique course of training which he
 has daily undergone since he appeared
 in this world has been systematically
 devised to serve in substitution for the
 usual processes of amusement con-
 trived for other children of his station.
 His playthings are the delicate instru-
 ments of his fathers laboratory, and
 he enjoys as much fun with this odd
 apparatus as the average youngster
 acquires from his dolls or his hobby
 horse.
 Baby Gates father told the writer, in , the beginning of the interview, which
 took place partly at his laboratory and
 partly at his adjacent residence, that
 his original theories relating to scien-
 tifc child-rearing have been based
 upon numerous experiments which he
 has for a number of years made with
 animals, such as dogs, guinea pigs,
 mice and others. These animals have
 had their brains trained by different
 processes which he applies to man,
 now that he has seen their exact ef- } fects. A man who can't train a dumb 5 beast, this eXperimenter said, is unfit l to train young infant It is very 3 dangerous, in his opinion, to subject l children to any experimental processes 3 whose exact effects have not first been l accurately determined by scientific in- l vestigation.
 Education Beginning Long Before Birth.
 U Baby Gates training according to the f father. began about two years before
 he was born. In the psychological opin- l ion, the mental, moral and physical de- l velopments of a child are profoundly
 modified by the intellectual and emo- a tional life as we'll as by the health ot = both parents during period preceding V it's creation. He says that some mod , ern biologists believe that characters I acquired by parents during their owr
 lives cannot be transmitted directly tC
 their children. To contradict this, ht t lately trained guinea-pigs for four sue Il cessive generations in the use of theil f seeing faculties, and he found that the - young of the fourth generation were V born with a much greater number O d cells in the seeing areas of their brain: " than were found in the brains of othel e guinea-pigs which he had not trained The complicated processes by whiel - the Gates baby is trained are based e upon an original classification of thu
 senses, which the psychologist has de S vised after studying all of the classes tt of nerves. According to this we hav $ eight senses instead of five, as wa D taught to us in school. These sense It are sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch 0 sense of cold, sense of heat, and thu s muscular touch.
 r. Sense of Touch.
 Soon after his baby was born, tn
 psychologist began, as the first train ing, to develop the brain-cells control a ing his senses of heat and cold. Eacl e day he was placed into tub of water
 whose temperature could be varied t d any degree. At first single bath wa e given in water having the normal tenn
 perature of his body. At the end of si, b weeks two additional baths were ad
 ministered, one slightly warmer, ant e the other slightly cooler. The bab. e was placed first in the cool, then in tn
 normal, and last in the warm water n The limits of the temperatures of tn
 cool and warm water were more exag .- gerated from week to week by addin; 5, more baths, and thus has the infan l. been trained to endure considerabl,
 high and low temperatures by gradua d and never sudden changes. A devic e for deveolping the acuteness of tn e child's heat and cold senses is pair o d rubber gloves, connected with both l. warm and cold water supply. Thes
 are daily rubbed over the entire sur d face of his little body, while the wate e inside is made gradually warmer 0 y cooler As g. result of this, the psy II chologist explained, the baby will b
 able to endure great differences of tenn l. perature, and his brain will be store |. with memories of all the degrees o
 heat and cold which any one is likel n | to oponuntp, in tha pOl1rsa of life