of infancy and childhood is one of
the most prolific causes of insanity. Such an education, or rather
miseducation, causes a predisposition in many, and excites one where it
already exists, which ultimately renders the animal propensities of our
nature uncontrollable. Appetites indulged and perverted, passions
unrestrained, propensities rendered vigorous by indulgence, and
subjected to no salutary restraint, bring persons into a condition in
which both moral and physical causes easily operate to produce insanity,
if they do not produce it themselves.

We must look to well-directed systems of popular education, having for
their object physical improvement, no less than mental and moral
culture, to relieve us from many of the evils which "flesh is heir to,"
and nothing can so effectually secure us from this most formidable
disease (as well as from others not less appalling) as that system of
instruction which teaches us how to preserve the normal condition of the
body and the mind; to fortify the one against the catalogue of physical
causes which every where assail us, and to elevate the other above the
influence of the trials and disappointments of life, so that the host of
moral causes which affect the brain, through the medium of the mind,
shall be inoperative and harmless.

Those first principles of physical education which teach us how to
avoid disease are all-important to all liable to insanity from
hereditary predisposition. The physical health must be attended to, and
the training of the faculties of the mind be such as to counteract the
over-active propensities of our nature--correcting the bias of the mind
to wrong currents and to too great activity by bringing into action the
antagonizing powers, and thus giving a sound body and a well-balanced
mind. Neglect of this early training entails evils upon the young which
are felt in all after life.

These positions are stated and amplified in the able reports of Dr. S.
B. Woodward, superintendent of the State Lunatic Asylum, Worcester,
Mass., to which the reader is referred. They are also corroborated by
persons who have had the care of the insane in other institutions. In
the eighteenth annual report of the physician and superintendent of the
Connecticut Retreat for the Insane, Dr. Brigham says, "a knowledge of
the nature of the disease would frequently lead to its prevention.
Insanity, in most cases, arises from undue excitement and labor of the
brain; for even