Brain-Work and Brain-Worry.
THIS is the text of a good hygienic discourse in a foreign journal, and the "conclusion of the whole matter" is as follows: "Brain-work is conducive to health and longevity, while brain-worry causes disease and shortens life. The truth of the statement, and its application to what we see around us, is evident enough; yet it is well that such subjects should continually be discussed. Intellectual labor, although severe, like that performed by the judges of our highest courts, or by scholars and persons devoted to literary pursuits, if unmixed with excitement, and followed with regularity, is seen to promote bodily health and long life. On the other hand, mental cares, attended with suppressed emotions, and occupations which from their nature are subject to great vicissitudes of fortune and constant anxiety, break down the health of the strongest. Every one has seen a class of men whose early mental training was deficient, and to whom the writing of memoranda was irksome, engaged in middle life in great undertakings, and taxing the memory with a mass of complicated business accounts, simply because they could more easily remember than write. Their power of memory for a certain kind of facts is often truly astonishing, but the strain is at last too much, and they die before their time. The brain-worry of our school children might furnish useful illustrations of the truth of the same general proposition, but we forbear."