BRAINS VERSUS MUSCLE

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 2, 1901

BRAINS VERSUS MUSCLE.

The following beautiful passage is by the Rev. J. E. Corning. It will be appreciated by all “brain workers:” “While I sit at my study table with my pen in my hand, the fingers moving with tardy pace at the beckon of brain, I hear right below my window, in the adjacent field, the monotonous ring of a laborer’s hoe upon the corn hills. While he hoes, he whistles hour by hour, until the clock strikes twelve, and then with ravenous appetite repairs to his bountiful yet simple meal, only to resume his task again and pursue it to the setting of the sun. As I stood at the window watching his toil, and turned again to my pen and paper, I asked myself how it happens that the man with the hoe will labor his eight or ten hours a day with less fatigue than the man with his pen will toil his three or four.

the night hours in feverish wakefulness. And thus we get a great organic law of our being; to wit, that brain work subtracts vitality from the fountain, while muscle work makes only draughts upon one of the ramifying streams of life. It is estimated by scientific observers that a man will use up as much vital force in working his brain two hours as he will in working his muscles eight.”

“Hugh Miller was a great worker with the shovel and pick—would have made a good hand in a slate quarry, in grading a railroad, or digging a canal. But one night, as you know, he shot himself in a fit of nervous fever. What was the difference between the great geologist and the man with the hoe whistling under my window? Simply this! The former was a worker of brain, and the latter, a worker of muscle. Let this man with the hoe lay down his husbandry for a little while, and set himself to studying one of the stalks of corn, or the chemistry of one of those hills of soil, and very likely he would soon learn what it is to lose one’s appetite, and hear the clock strike nearly all