despair or anger. But frequently idle nerve may be helped by patience and watchfulness. Sometimes it is merely a stage in nerve development which passes away. Sometimes it is a pathological state for which the physician can do more than the formal moralist or the too eager schoolmaster. An industrious boy cannot help being industrious. Now and then, indeed, industry is excessive, and is a nerveailment; add to this ailment an extensive curriculum, numberless examinations, an exacting and exhausting university, and the result is life-long disaster-life on a lower nerve level. One boy (or girl) has silent nerve; he should be encouraged to make little speeches. Another boy has voluble nerve; he should be taught, in some measure, to ask his questions and express his thoughts in writing. Reflecting nerve should be taught to act. Acting nerve should be taught to reflect.

The physiologist can give great help when the time comes to choose a vocation. For when nerve failings have been strengthened and nerve overflow checked, nerve proclivities have still to be reckoned with. Is it well, for example, to make a barrister of a young fellow who

takes after a speechless parent? Or a science student of a garrulous youth who inherits no faculty either of observation, or reflection, or inference? Why put to a calling which demands abstract thought one who inherits a preference for detail and action? Why put to affairs the counterpart of a pensive and poetic parent?

The physiologist cares for all nerve life: he cares for the poet's coinage, for the philosopher's deduction, and for the infant's lesson also. Much young brain is undoubtedly overworked. Change of task brings but partial relief, and then only if it be slight, or mechanical, or amusing. It is true that in all mental work millions of grey cells are left unused; but these cells are not independent, self-sustaining, self-acting cells. Nerve force, pure blood, oxygen, form a definite and limited sum-total. It is not thinking only that uses up thinking nerve; the convertibility of nerve force goes much further. Powerful emotion-force destroys thought-force; deep thought-force destroys emotion-force. Excessive muscular force (notwithstanding that motor nerve-centres are more or less isolated centres) impairs both thought and feeling.

What then (the question comes home to every one) is a given, individual nervous organisation capable of doing? Physiology in reply tells us to look first at nerve inheritance. If no tendency to nerve ailment is inherited, and especially if none exists on the parental side which the individual follows, if no accident has intervened in the transmission of nerve or in its training, the child may be set to work—the adult to hard work. But not otherwise. Nothing approaching to strain must be put on brain which inherits trouble or weakness. The outward bodily appearance is altogether misleading. To stout limbs and red cheeks there may be joined a nervous system quite incapable of effort. While within a pale skin and delicate frame there may be a brain which close and continued labour cannot easily injure.

The wear and tear of brain or nerve is not

confined to the young. To the toil (especially mental toil) of maturity are added cares which tell on nerve even more than toil. It is not easy to devise remedies. But one incalculable boon for all toilers would be the establishment of more frequent days of rest-more Sundays. One of the traditions of an indolent and super

stitious time, adopted and spread (with much other superstition) by the Roman empire at the bidding of an ignorant and credulous soldiery, was the Hebrew "six days" legend with its six days' labour. Much better is the teaching of physiology: work, the life's work, thought, research, truth-seeking, science-these chiefly for three or four days; then, on the fourth or fifth day-the newer Sunday, recreation, contemplation, the solace of the arts-poetic, dramatic, musical, pictorial, and above all the surrender of self to the ennobling charms of nature.

Meanwhile, seeing that we cannot compel the world to be tranquil, let us, as far as our individual physiology permits, make ourselves tranquil. If the mind can make a heaven of hell, or hell of heaven, it can surely cut for itself a quiet pathway through a busy world.

Progress is a chapter in historical physiology: a chapter which records how inner nerve and outer circumstance are both changed; how circumstance develops nerve; how nerve multiplies circumstance. Every sort of nerve is changed, intellectual, moral, and bodily.

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Intellectual nerve grows more acute; moral nerve more refined; bodily nerve stronger. In health the several nerve actions always keep near together. It is true that unhealthful and abnormal nerve states and actions

are unhappily frequent. Intellectual nerve may be powerful and moral nerve weak; less frequently, perhaps, moral nerve is stronger than the intellectual. The disproportionate strength of body in the labouring class is the result of inheritance under long continued abnormal conditions. But even in this class it will often be found that the bodily stronger man is also the more intelligent, and the more moral. Let us, putting exceptional nerve aside, look at a few hundreds of average men. The hundred which have the largest sum of mental nerve and mind, will also have the largest sum of moral nerve and morals; they will, moreover, in all liklihood, have the largest sum of bodily nerve and bodily efficiency. More than this-to return to the question of progress a hundred modern men, of a really progressive people, will be found, in mind, morals, and body to have gone beyond any previous hundred of the same or probably of any other race.