526 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



To restate: during calms, those life phenomena which are due to 

 depleted vitality are excessive. But let us return to those phenomena 

 which were deficient in occurrence during cahns. They were misde- 

 meanors in public schools and penitentiaries, cases of assault and bat- 

 tery, insanity, drunkenness and suicide. To analyze each briefly: In 

 the public schools, sins of commission rather than sins of omission are 

 usually the occasion of bad marks in deportment. It is usually the 

 active, energetic boy, the one with vitality to spare who gets the 

 demerits. The anemic youngster may never stand at the head of his 

 class, but he is very likely to delight his fond marmna with a mark of 

 100 in deportment. If that be so, and I speak with authority upon this 

 point if upon no other, disorder in the school room is an active thing, 

 and an evidence of excessive vitality. With the penitentiary inmate I 

 have had less experience, but upon d priori grounds would argue that 

 what is true for the child in question of deportment would not be 

 radically different for the adult. In fact the wardens in charge, upon 

 being questioned on the matter, gave it as their opinion that the 

 prevalence of disorder bore a pretty close relation to physical health, 

 varying directly with it; that order was only preserved through evi- 

 dence of superior force on their part; that a sick person was always 

 a good one, but that with a return to health conditions were frequently 

 very different. We may then conclude that in the penitentiary mis- 

 demeanors are evidences of excessive vitality. 



With persons arrested for the crime of assault and battery the same 

 is, I believe, demonstrably true. One might feel like fighting and 

 perhaps more frequently does feel so when possessed of *that tired feel- 

 ing' which is the fortune of patent medicine venders, but to feel like 

 fighting without doing so, never brought a man before the police judge 

 for the crime which we are considering. There must be both the in- 

 clination and the consciousness of strength to back it up before one 

 would be likely to figure in this class of data. 



In the case of the next class, that of arrests for insanity, we shall 

 take the word of the psychiatrist that acute mania increases with any 

 condition which tends to augment the output of nervous energy. The 

 daily fi actuations in strength which all have experienced are not so 

 much those of physical, as of nervous energy, if the distinction may be 

 made, and with any having tendencies to mania the results would be 

 those which our records showed. 



With the occurrence of drunkenness and of suicide we have seem- 

 ing contradiction to the belief which I have been attempting to main- 

 tain for the other phenomena which were deficient during calms, 

 namely that they were evidences of excessive vitality. To discuss the 

 peculiar problem which each of these presents would take us too far 

 from our present subject, so I will simply refer any who are interested 



