here neither the one nor the other to the same degree. And so also the amount of excitation from work which the brain will bear varies exceedingly with variations of climatic influences.

We are all of us familiar with the fact that physical work is more or less exhausting in different climates, and as I am dealing, or about to deal, with the work of business men, which involves a certain share of corporal exertion, as well as with that of mere scholars, I must ask leave to digress, in order to show that in this part of the country at least the work of the body probably occasions more strain than in Europe, and is followed by greater sense of fatigue.

The question is certainly a large one, and should include a consideration of matters connected with food and stimulants, on which I can but touch. I have carefully questioned a number of master-mechanics who employ both foreigners and native Americans, and I am assured that the British workman finds labor more trying here than at home; while perhaps the eight-hour movement may be looked upon as an instinctive expression of the main fact as regards our working class in general.

A distinguished English scholar informs me that since he has resided among us the same complaints, as to the depressing effects of physical labor in America, have come to him from skilled English mechanics. What share change of diet and the like may have in the matter I have not space to discuss.^[10]

Although, from what I have seen, I should judge that overtasked men of science are especially liable to the trouble which I have called cerebral exhaustion, all classes of men who use the brain severely, and who have also--and this is important--seasons of excessive anxiety or of grave responsibility, are subject to the same form of disease; and this I presume is why we meet with numerous instances of nervous exhaustion among merchants and manufacturers. The lawyer and clergyman offer examples, but I do not remember to have seen many bad cases among physicians. Dismissing the easy jest which the latter statement will surely suggest, the reason for this we may presently encounter.

My note-books seem to show that manufacturers and certain classes of railway officials are the most liable to suffer from neural exhaustion. Next to these come merchants in general, brokers, etc.; then less frequently clergymen; still less often lawyers; and more rarely doctors; while distressing cases are apt to occur among the overschooled young of both sexes.

The worst instances to be met with are among young men suddenly cast into business positions involving weighty responsibility. I can recall several cases of men under or just over twenty-one who have lost health while attempting to carry the responsibilities of great manufactories. Excited and stimulated by the pride of such a charge, they have worked with a certain exaltation of brain, and, achieving success, have been stricken down in the moment of triumph. This too frequent practice of immature men going into business, especially with borrowed capital, is a serious evil. The same person, gradually trained to naturally and slowly increasing burdens, would have been sure of healthy success. In individual cases I have found it so often vain to remonstrate or to point out the various habits which collectively act for mischief on our business class that I may well despair of doing good by a mere general statement. As I have noted them, connected with cases of overwork, they are these: late hours of work, irregular meals bolted in haste away from home, the want of holidays and of pursuits outside of business, and the consequent practice of carrying home, as the only subject of talk, the cares and successes of the counting-house and the stock-board. Most of these evil habits require no comment. What, indeed, can be said? The man who has worked hard all day, and lunched or dined hastily, comes home or goes to the club to converse--save the mark!--about goods and stocks. Holidays, except in summer, he knows not, and it is then thought time enough taken from work if the man sleeps in the country and comes into a hot city daily, or at the best has a week or two at the sea-shore. This incessant monotony tells in the end. Men have confessed to me that for twenty years they had worked every day, often travelling at night or on Sundays to save time, and that in all this period they had not taken one day for play. These are extreme instances, but they are also in a measure representative of a frightfully general social evil.

Is it any wonder if asylums for the insane gape for such men? There comes to them at last a season of business embarrassment; or, when they get to be fifty or thereabouts, the brain begins to feel the strain, and just as they are thinking, "Now we will stop and enjoy ourselves," the brain, which, slave-like, never murmurs until it breaks out into open insurrection, suddenly refuses to work, and the mischief is done. There are therefore two periods of existence especially prone to those troubles,--one when the mind is maturing; another at the turning-point of life, when the brain has attained its fullest power, and has left behind it accomplished the larger part of its best enterprise and most active labor.

I am disposed to think that the variety of work done by lawyers, their long summer holiday, their more general cultivation, their usual tastes for literary or other objects out of their business walks, may, to some extent, save them, as well as the fact that they can rarely be subject to the sudden and fearful responsibilities of business men. Moreover, like the doctor, the lawyer gets his weight upon him slowly, and is thirty at least before it can be heavy enough to task him severely. The business man's only limitation is need of money, and few young mercantile men will hesitate to enter trade on their own account if they can command capital. With the doctor, as with the lawyer, a long intellectual education, a slowly-increasing strain, and responsibilities of gradual growth tend, with his out-door life, to save him from the form of disease I have been alluding to. This element of open-air life, I suspect, has a share in protecting men who in many respects lead a most unhealthy existence. The doctor, who is supposed to get a large share of exercise, in reality gets very little after he grows too busy to walk, and has then only the incidental exposure to out-of-door air. When this is associated with a fair share of physical exertion, it is an immense safeguard against the ills of anxiety and too much brain-work. For these reasons I do not doubt that the effects of our great civil war were far more severely felt by the Secretary of War and President Lincoln than by Grant or Sherman.

The wearing, incessant cares of overwork, of business anxiety, and the like, produce directly diseases of the nervous system, and are also the fertile parents of dyspepsia, consumption, and maladies of the heart. How often we can trace all the forms of the first-named protean disease to such causes is only too well known to every physician, and their connection with cardiac troubles is also well understood. Happily, functional troubles of heart or stomach are far from unfrequent precursors of the graver mischief which finally falls upon the nerve-centres if the lighter warnings have been neglected; and for this reason no man who has to use his brain energetically and for long periods can afford to disregard the hints which he gets from attacks of palpitation of heart or from a disordered stomach. In many instances these are the only expressions of the fact that he is abusing the machinery of mind or body; and the sufferer may think himself fortunate that this is the case, since even the least serious degrees of direct exhaustion of the centres with which he feels and thinks are more grave and are less open to ready relief.

When affections of the outlying organs are neglected, and even in many cases where these have not suffered at all, we are apt to witness, as a result of too prolonged anxiety