Study and Longevity by Dr. W. W. Hall

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, Cal. · Jul 29, 1875

Study and Longevity.

By Dr. W. W. Hall

Because brain work promotes the consumption of nutrition quite as much as bodily labor, a hard student will get ravenously hungry. The thing which keeps a man in health is the constant renewal of the particles of his body. Labor uses up the new particles of nutriment, and works off the old ones; eating supplies new ones in their stead, and in this way the body is always kept new and young, and vigorous and thrifty. If a man does not work at all, sits still for a great part of his time, the old worn-out particles of the system remain in it, and clog it up, and before long the body becomes torpid and the mind dull, in time approaching to idiocy.

The brain, like the body, appropriates the nutriment of food to its uses, and works off the old, effete matter. Kant, one of the most profound thinkers of his generation, living beyond three score and ten, gave it as the result of his observation that “intellectual pursuits tend to prolong life;” and President Humphrey, of Amherst College, said, at the age of eighty-two, “I have yet to see the man who died from the effects of hard study.” Newton, the greatest thinker of his time, lived to the age of seventy-three; and Herschel, the greatest astronomer of his age, lived beyond ninety, and so did Humboldt, the author of “Cosmos.” If ever a hard student dies young, it is because he has not lived rightly.—Dr. W. W. Hall.