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by his own horse-and-chaise power to the "Convention of Ministers," when Election Week came round, with his own annual attendance at a year's directors' meetings, committee meetings, board meetings, and trustees' meetings. Let him look at the schedule of books attached to his grandfather's will, called his "library," to see that there are not so many in all as he has been expected to give an opinion on in the conversation of the last five years of life. Let him count, in the diary, the number of public opinions which his grandfather formed in ten years of voting for Washington, Adams, Bowdoin, and Strong, against the opinions which he has himself been compelled to form, and form correctly, regarding foreign and home politics, state administration, city, church, and school affairs, regarding water, gas, horse-railroads, schoolventilation, foreign emigration, negro emancipation, and the rest; opinions which he has had to enforce and to carry, if he could, at three or four special, city, state, and national elections, every year. Any man who will make this contrast will see that this generation requires an amount of intellectual readiness, and a degree of economy in the right and righteous use of intellectual power, such as no generation has required before.

We have no hope of laying down the true system of the maximum of intellectual effort. But we do hope to show that teachers, of whatever grade, ought to give more attention than they have done to suggesting for their pupils systems so essential. To take a little instance: there is not an axiom in physies more absolutely settled, than the fact that no mental labor of any sort should be attempted within the hour after a full meal. Yet it is within a very few years only that the University at our Cambridge ceased to bid students recite within forty minutes after the beginning of breakfast, and within an hour after the beginning of dinner. What was as bad was, that half the college recited or shall we say pretended to recite before breakfast was served. The old monks, from whom the greater part of our college system has descended, at least knew better than this. In these details, matters are now better ordered at Cambridge. It is possible that the gymnasium and the drill-sergeant may introduce yet more

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improvements. We hear rumors sometimes of practical hints, given by professors there, of the way to bring mental faculty into play. And we are not without hopes that, as there has long been a course there on "The Means of Preserving Health," some teacher may introduce a course on "The Methods of Using Intellectual Power." Such a course comes fairly within the range either of theology, ethics, metaphysics, or hygiene; and whoever first does throw into system the results of thirty years of his own experience, and teach the arts, methods, and science of best husbanding and cultivating, and of most quickly and vividly using, intellectual power, whether of the meanest or finest quality, will earn the gratitude of the meanest and finest minds together, and a claim to a share in whatever good they may ever work for mankind.

1. In pointing out the relations of such instruction to the different lines of human science, we must, with whatever regret, speak first of its physiological relations. We beg the reader, however, not, for this, to turn ruthlessly from this paper, as if he had here only another dividend from the assets of Sylvester-Grahamism, or House-I-Live-in-ism. We are forced to speak of physiology; but our chief object is to say that the folly is now nearly exploded which mistook the severe treatment necessary (perhaps) for the cure of students in confirmed dyspepsia, for the proper treatment of men in health, eager to work, mentally, under the requisitions of this time, up to the very top of their steam. The dyspeptics may settle with the doctors what is the proper treatment for them. We neither know nor care. Our business is with men in health, that they may keep their health, and that they may find out what is the highest amount of their working power, and may keep to that without overrunning it. We venture to say that, for them, any system of half-diet, of scales to weigh daily bread, of food marked by some invalid name, any system, in short, which in any way suggests hospitals or convalescence, -is bad practice. On the other hand, we venture to say to the dyspeptics that they had better leave the company of men working with their minds till they are well. It will not be long. There is always open, for instance, the army; and when on foot in the open air, we forget the doctor soon.

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The dictum with regard to food, then, is probably that of one of our most judicious medical men, to whom this community is largely indebted, who used to say to his class, "In brief, gentlemen, you may eat what you choose, when you choose, and as often as you choose; only be careful not to look at your tongues after you have done." For as in the highest stage which in this life we come to in the religious life, a man forgets he has a soul, through ninety-nine out of a hundred of the hours which he crowds full of enterprise for the glory of God, so, in the lower plane of which we speak now, he forgets, by a corresponding law, that he has a body. The degree to which he remembers or forgets it gives an accurate measurement of its frailty or its health.

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For all this, however, he has a body; and the ignorance of youth, which risks it sometimes to its ruin, is not the same grace as the confirmed habit of discipline to which we would lead youth, which uses it as not abusing it. They are, least, as different as is innocence from virtue. body. It is one of his tools. His mind is the other. Now, the Latin Grammar is very right in saying, "The mind itself knows not what the mind is," which is as true of Spurzheim's mind as it was of Cicero's. But the mind does know, by this time, that, whatever it is or is not, it works by means of a physical arrangement called a brain, or a pair of brains. Let the question lie, then, what the mind is. Still, in discussing the discipline of its working power, we must say something, however unwillingly, on the physiological conditions of the brain, on the privileges to which it is entitled, and the cautions which it has a right to claim from those who would effect the most the most promptly, with an organ so exquisite and so delicate.

The familiar statement that the "brain is the stomach," or the "stomach is the brain," which we sometimes hear, would probably not satisfy the anatomists. But it expresses very conveniently some results of physiology and anatomy which all workmen ought to remember. The chief of them is this, that, at the moment that you have given the stomach its work to do, you have no right to call upon the brain, at the other end of the same system, to be working for you also. When

you are journeying, you take assiduous care that your horse shall not be compelled to do any work in the hour after he has slowly eaten his grain. The horse has cost you money ; and, even in the poor business of his muscular action, you know that he needs all his vital resource for the single matter of getting his grain in part stowed away. Because you happen to be impatient, you do not risk his health, which you have paid for. Now, it is true that you never bought your brain at a horse-market. It might not fetch a bid there. Certainly it ought not, if you have no more practical notion, after your experience of it, than to set it hard at work while the whole working power of your system has been pre-engaged lower down. Consider what you have done. You have poured together a pint of coffee, three hot biscuits buttered, the lean parts of two mutton-chops, and a slice of stale bread, into the reservoir which contains your provisions for the first six hours of the day. You have done this by way of breaking the fast of the night before. Give to the officials who have the present charge of those supplies an hour's uninterrupted time, after you have done: do not embarrass them by constantly sending down to ask what is seven times nine, or what is the interest for four years and eleven days on blank hundred and blankty-blank dollars at blank per cent. Give them that hour of undisturbed work on their present business, and then start the engine slowly; and thank us, who have advised you, for the promptness and efficiency of its new evolution.

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Without dabbling in the detail of physiology, we may say, simply, that one precise object for which you have eaten your breakfast is to give to this delicate organ, the brain, the compensation it needs for the work it did for you yesterday. You may call it wages, if you regard the brain as your servant, or food, if you regard it as your slave, or sympathy and encouragement, if you regard it as your friend. Whatever you call the breakfast, the fact is, that the brain lost in amount of substance yesterday just in proportion as you worked hard with it. The nice observations of a few years past have shown to a certainty that the brain loses elements, which may be detected as phosphates in the fluids of the body, just in proportion to the intensity of its exercise. The masterly ar

gument with which you kept that drowsy jury awake yesterday cost you its weight in phosphate. The letter of entreaty which you wrote last night (which you should have left till this morning) was well put, succinct, and pathetic; and it cost you, therefore, its weight in phosphate. Your calculation of the comet's orbit differs by two days from Dr. Pape's. You have analyzed your work, and, in a day's careful labor, have proved to all men and angels that you are right, and that Dr. Pape is wrong. Yes, that is very fine; but the tongs which you put into that white-heat lost some little scales of iron as you turned over and over the equations and formulas. The triumphant calculation cost your brain just its weight in phosphate. Do not cheat the servant or the friend who has served you so. Or, do you count him as a slave, do not cheat yourself by starving him. And if you mean to work him in that same fashion to-day, let him have new phosphates exquisitely and carefully elaborated from the coffee, the chop, and the bread-and-butter; let the new and the old be well introduced to each other, and on good social terms, before you give the word for new duty.

It is not simply new substance, however, which the brain requires. While we know very little about its methods, we know that it has methods which it insists upon. We will not anticipate the physiologists so far as to say it is a Voltaic battery but this is a guess so well sustained now, that we might do that with reason; and we may say that, in the particular matter with which we are dealing, it works with exactly the laws of a Voltaic battery. Those laws are now matters understood in daily practice. Bear them in mind. If you were De Sauty working the Atlantic Telegraph, seeking the highest power from your battery, and the most precise action, would you use the very same fluids to stimulate the plates month after month, regardless of the wear of the plates, and the disintegration of the liquid? Not at all. You have not only to renew the plates at certain periods, but you have, at shorter periods, to renew the liquids. Of course you would never attempt to work without liquids in the battery. As well work without plates. Of course you would not be satisfied, even though you had the best double-combination improved battery

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