all add to the sum of that which is to be learned, and widen
the field in which there is work to be done. What we need to
learn is, however, that all these things are for man, not man
for them. If knowledge has increased, we should take more time
for acquiring it, knowing that, with the consequent increase
of power, we shall be able to achieve as much afterward in the
shorter time as our predecessors did in the longer time their
briefer study afforded. Greater ability should mean not only
greater results wrought, but fuller repose as well. For it
would be a sorry ending of this splendid age of learning and
of labor to be known as an age of unsettled brains and
shattered nerves.

A distinguished medical authority says:

"It is proved beyond any dispute that nervousness is the
characteristic malady of the American Nation, growing upon
them in a frightfully accelerated ratio every year, and
threatening them with disasters at no distant date which the
mind shrinks from contemplating."

He continues as follows: "The number of deaths from this cause
is already appalling and is steadily and rapidly increasing.
In some of the busy centres the tables of mortality show that
the proportion of nerve deaths has multiplied more than twenty
times in the last forty years, and that now the nerve deaths
number more than one-fourth of all the deaths recorded. What
is most shocking in these returns, this fearful loss of life
occurs mainly among young people of both sexes."

"This means that the Americans are fast becoming a very
short-lived people; and that if they were shut in on
themselves for only a few years, without any influx of
vitality by immigration, the publication of the census would
send a pang of horror and alarm throughout the land."

The annual report of the State Board of Charities of the State of New
York for 1894, shows that while the increase in the State's population
from 1880 to 1892 was 28 per cent., the increase of the insane in State
institutions for the same period was 83 per cent.!

The enjoyment of the fruits of fortune, earned at the expense of the
nerve cells, is an impossibility. The quiet and harmony of the nerve
centres and nervous system are gone. Rest is impossible, continuance of
work only causes increased jarring and discord of that many stringed and