Study Beneficial to Health.
The London Globe editorially presents the following: “True study is an eminently leisurely process, the great condition of success in it being deliberation, and though it always sufficiently interests the student to keep his faculties lively, it seldom excites him to any dangerous degree. Hence I believe that genuine study is much less injurious to health than is often supposed—certainly much less injurious than many things that are scarcely reputed injurious at all. The processes of genuine and well-directed study positively save the brain by their rational and orderly sequences, by the safe advance from step to step. Study of this kind is like a well-built staircase, by which you can climb to a great height with a minimum of fatigue, never lifting the body more than a few inches at a time. But as there might be such a thing as racing up a staircase, so when we study against time, there is a strain in the mere speed, however good may be the system we are following. There may also be a strain on the faculties in the direction of them toward a kind of study which is not adapted to our natural gifts. If we learn what nature qualified us to learn, and learn it step by step, without hurry, we incur a minimum of cerebral fatigue and gain a maximum of acquirement. Study of this kind gently stimulates and does not fatigue, unless prolonged for an unreasonable length of time. It is positively favorable to health, because it is favorable to cheerfulness; it makes life pleasanter and more interesting, and so far from being injurious to the nervous system, gives it tone and vigor, just as manly exercises give tone and vigor to the muscular system. There can be no doubt that men were intended to bear intellectual labor without injury to their health; we are constituted to think and learn, just as a fish is constituted to swim or a bird to fly.—Sel.