226 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ical. A weight is a much better device, and yields a large per cent, of 

 the power expended in raising it when it falls. Such an arrangement is, 

 however, a thoroughly impracticable one, as a simple calculation will 

 show. It takes about four hundred foot-pounds per minute to drive a 

 sewing-machine, so that to run one an hour a weight of a fifth of a ton 

 would have to fall sixty feet. The only practicable way of utilizing 

 gravity for motive power is by the water-wheel, where the weight can 

 fall continually, and the cost of raising it again is a minimum. 







INDIGESTION AS A CAUSE OF NERVOUS DEPEES- 



SION. 



By T. LAUDEE BEUNTON, M. D., F. E. S. 



TO most men who are engaged in intellectual work, an autumn 

 holiday has become a matter of necessity, and is not to be re- 

 garded as a mere luxury. During eleven months of the year many 

 who are engaged in brain-work systematically overtax themselves, 

 trusting to the month's holiday to bring them again into proper work- 

 ing order. Formerly this was not the case. Men seemed to be able 

 to go on, not only month after month, but year after year, without 

 any vacation at all. The circumstances under which they lived were 

 different from those which exist now. The very means which facili- 

 tate our holidays the network of railways which puts us into com- 

 plete and easy communication with any part of the Continent of Eu- 

 rope, or the quick ocean-steamers which enable us to enjoy half of a 

 six weeks' holiday on the other side of the Atlantic, as well as the tel- 

 egraphic communications which will warn us in a moment, even at the 

 most distant point of our travels, of any urgent necessity for an imme- 

 diate return all these are the very means which increase our labor 

 during the greater part of the year. We live at high pressure ; letters 

 and telegrams keep us constantly on the qui vive ; express trains 

 hurry us miles away from home in the morning and back again in the 

 evening, and the pressure of competition is so great that few men can 

 afford either to take their work easily or to modify the constant strain 

 of it by breaks of a day or two at a time. Wearied and exhausted, 

 the hard-worked man goes off for his autumn holiday, and, if he can, 

 will spend most of it in the open air, either yachting, walking by the 

 seashore, strolling in the country, shooting on the moors, or climbing 

 the Welsh hills or the Swiss mountains. After a month spent in any 

 of these ways, the brain-worker comes back to town feeling himself 

 a different man. Instead of his work being a slavery to him, as it was 

 before he started, he feels it to be a pleasure ; he gets through it with 

 ease, and feels not only that the amount he can accomplish is greatly 



