422 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



is applied on the large scale. More especially they believe that the 

 habit of inducing unnecessary emotional excitement, in young persons 

 who are just entering the dangerous period of commencing sexual life, 

 is so morally and physically injurious to a large number of individ- 

 uals, that it may well be questioned whether those individuals might 

 not have been more safely left in total neglect and ignorance. We 

 suspect the writer in the Spectator little knows for no one but a med- 

 ical man can know the terribly doubly-edged character of all those 

 more powerful emotions which he believes are so exalting in their ef- 

 fects upon the spiritual nature. Here and there, it is true, we do find 

 some one of such stern Roman nature that he can take a torturing 

 emotion into the recesses of his heart, and discipline himself by the 

 pain which its repression causes, and by that pain alone. But, for the 

 common race of man, it seems to be the duty of the physiologist to 

 insist first, that the immature and tender system of the young should 

 never be exposed to the influence of any avoidable emotion, unless it 

 be such as can be freely and harmlessly expressed, and in particular 

 that self-invented spiritual tortures should be absolutely interdicted ; 

 and secondly, that older persons, who must be exposed to disturbing 

 emotions, should at least be encouraged by all means to balance pain- 

 ful with pleasing and refining feelings, and, above all, to have confi- 

 dence in the really soothing and strengthening character of regular 

 fairly strenuous intellectual work, and the favorable influence which 

 is exerted, even upon moral character, by the substitution of produc- 

 tive labor for the fluctuations of sterile excitement. London Lancet. 



THE ROMANCE OF MEDICINE. 



Bt eeedeeick aenold. 



IN once more gathering up the threads of this subject from other 

 years, and endeavoring to address a lay audience from a laic 

 point of view, one would naturally desire, according to the limited 

 measure of one's ability, to grasp some medical subject for which we 

 all have an affinity, and which may be of usefulness to some. But in 

 these papers I enter into an implied bargain with my readers to tell 

 them something picturesque and odd something that may even be 

 romantic and sensational : but I am also troubled with the uneasy idea 

 that I might ventilate some matters that might be for the health and 

 happiness of some of us. I am like some honest citizen who has only 

 got some modest extent of garden-plot, which he feels bound to lay out 

 with flowers, but at the same time he has some yearnings toward 

 homely but esculent vegetables ; or, to vary the simile, just as mathe- 

 maticians have their pure and applied mathematics, so in discussing 



