WAYLAND defined happiness as “pleasurable consciousness.” The well-fed horse, the browsing cow, the gamboling colt, the playful kitten and its mother-cat fondly watching it, are filled with pleasurable consciousness. This is provided for on the normal action of the physical system. The capering child is happy for the same reason. Ancient sages thought that the spheres were so arranged that their various motions made entrancing music. Happiness is the music of the physical system in its proper working. It is most perfect where the vitality is fullest and most vigorous. This is quite different from the enjoyment of the appetites. The latter may be legitimate, but it is brief at best. He who lives for it destroys at length his power to enjoy. That eminent scientist, B. W. Richardson, F. R. S., has gone a little further, and given us the particular seat of this pleasurable consciousness. He says, “The center is not in the brain; it is in the vital nervous system—in the great ganglia of the sympathetic, lying not in the cerebro-spinal cavities, but in the cavities of the body itself, near the stomach and in the heart. We know where the glow which indicates felicity is felt, and our poets have ever described it with perfect truthfulness as in the breast. It comes as a fire kindling there.” The London Lancet declares this to be a scientific truth, demonstrated by a man of genius. It adds, “In other words, felicity is a physical result of a brisk and healthy circulation of blood through the vessels supplying the ganglia of the great sympathetic system of nerves; and whatever quickens, and at the same time frees, the flow of blood in these vessels particularly, engenders the feeling we call happiness. This is the fact, and we believe it explains the action of many articles of food and medicine and medical appliances. Everything in life and nature acts and reacts in a circle. Be happy, and your sympathetic ganglia will have the blood coursing through them with the bound of health; and this quickening of the pulse, if it be produced by good cheer, whether at the table or the mountain-side, will produce happiness.” Even intellectual enjoyment connects with the normal activity of the cerebral centers, and thus quickens the arterial flow through the sympathetic nervous system. It will be seen that, other things being equal, that man will be happiest whose physical system is kept in the best working order.—Youth’s Companion.