The digestion, says the author of a work published some years ago, is completely subjected to the influence of the moral and intellectual state. When the brain is wearied by the passions, appetite and digestion are almost gone....There is nowhere perfect health, save when the passions are well regulated, harmonized, and equipoised. Moral temperance is as indispensable to a calm and tranquil life as physiological temperance....If it is your desire that your circulatory, respiratory, and digestive functions should be discharged properly, normally, if you want your appetite to be good, your sleep sound, your humor equable, avoid all emotions that are overstrong, all pleasures that are too intense, and meet the inevitable sorrows and the cruel agonies of life with a firm and resigned soul. Ever have some occupation to employ and divert your mind, and to make it proof against the temptations of want or of desire. Thus will you attain the term of life without overmuch disquiet and affliction.--FERNAND PAPILLON, _in the Revue des Deux Mondes_.
BRAIN WORK, OVERWORK, AND WORRY (p. 205).--_Overstimulation of the Brain in Childhood_.--Most civilized communities have enacted laws against the employment of children in severe physical labor. This is well enough, for the muscles of young persons are tender and weak, and not, therefore, adapted to the work to which cupidity or ignorance would otherwise subject them. But no such fostering care does the State take of the brains of the young. There are no laws to prevent the undeveloped nervous system being overtasked and brought to disease, or even absolute destruction. Every physician sees cases of the kind, and wonders how parents of intelligence can be so blind to the welfare of their offspring as to force, or even to allow, their brains to be worked to a degree that, in many cases, results in idiocy or death. Only a few months ago I saw for the first time a boy of five years of age, with a large head, a prominent forehead, and all the other signs of mental precocity. He had read the first volume of Bryant's "History of the United States," and was preparing to tackle the other volumes! He read the magazines of the day with as much interest as did his father, and conversed with equal facility on the politics of the period. But a few weeks before I saw him he had begun to walk in his sleep, then chorea had made its appearance, and on the day before he was brought to me he had had a well-marked epileptic paroxysm. Already his mind is weakened --perhaps permanently so. Such cases are not isolated ones. They are continually occurring.