ositors,--nearly one-half.

According to a long series of investigations by Drs. Benoysten and
Lombard into occupations or trades where workers must inhale dust, it
appears that mineral dust is the most detrimental to health, animal
dust ranking next, and vegetable dust third.

In choosing an occupation, cleanliness, pure air, sunlight, and freedom
from corroding dust and poisonous gases are of the greatest importance.
A man who would sell a year of his life for any amount of money would
be considered insane, and yet we deliberately choose occupations and
vocations which statistics and physicians tell us will be practically
sure to cut off from five to twenty-five, thirty, or even forty years
of our lives, and are seemingly perfectly indifferent to our fate.

There is danger in a calling which requires great expenditure of
vitality at long, irregular intervals. He who is not regularly, or
systematically employed incurs perpetual risk. "Of the thirty-two
all-round athletes in a New York club not long ago," said a physician,
"three are dead of consumption, five have to wear trusses, four or five
are lop-shouldered, and three have catarrh and partial deafness." Dr.
Patten, chief surgeon at the National Soldiers' Home at Dayton, Ohio,
says that "of the five thousand soldiers in that institution fully
eighty per cent. are suffering from heart disease in one form or
another, due to the forced physical exertions of the campaigns."

Man's faculties and functions are so interrelated that whatever affects
one affects all. Athletes who over-develop the muscular system do so
at the expense of the physical, mental, and moral well-being. It is a
law of nature that the overdevelopment of any function or faculty,
forcing or straining it, tends not only to ruin it, but also to cause
injurious reactions on every other faculty and function.

Vigorous thought must come from a fresh brain. We cannot expect nerve,
snap, robustness and vigor, sprightliness and elasticity, in the
speech, in the book, or in the essay, from an exhausted, jaded brain.
The brain is one of the last organs of the body to reach maturity (at
about the age of twenty-eight), and should never be overworked,
especially in youth. The whole future of a man is often ruined by
over-straining the brain in school.

Brain-workers cannot do good, effective work in one line many hours a
day. When the brain is weary, when it begins to lose its elasticity
and freshness