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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



VITAL FORCE. 



THOUGH we have not the slightest concep- 

 tion of what life is in itself, and consequent- 

 ly could not define it, we may, for the sake of 

 convenience, think of it in this paper as some 

 kind of force. 



" In the wonderful story," says Prof. Huxley, 

 in his " Lay Sermons," " of the ' Feau de Cha- 

 grin,' the hero becomes possessed of a magical 

 wild ass's skin, which yields him the means of 

 gratifying all his wishes. But its surface repre- 

 sents the duration of the proprietor's life ; and, 

 for every satisfied desire, the skin shrinks, in 

 proportion to the intensity of fruition, until at 

 length life and the last handbreadth of the peau 

 de chagrin disappear with the gratification of a 

 last wish. Protoplasm or the physical basis of 

 life is a veritable peau de chagrin, and for every 

 vital act it is somewhat the smaller. All work 

 implies waste, and the work of life results, direct- 

 ly or indirectly, in the waste of protoplasm. 

 Every word uttered by a speaker costs him some 

 physical loss ; and, in the strictest sense, he burns 

 that others may have light — so much eloquence, 

 so much of his body resolved into carbonic acid, 

 water, and urea. It is clear that this process of 

 expenditure cannot go on forever. But, happily, 

 the protoplasmic peau de chagrin differs in its 

 capacity of being repaired and brought back to 

 its full size, after every exertion. For example, 

 this present lecture is conceivably expressible by 

 the number of grains of protoplasm and other 

 bodily substance wasted in maintaining my vital 

 process during its delivery. My peau de chagrin 

 will be distinctly smaller at the end of the dis- 

 course than it was at the beginning. By-and-by 

 I shall have recourse to the substance commonly 

 called mutton, for the purpose of stretching it 

 back to its original size." 



This explanation may be very philosophical, 

 but it is only a roundabout way of saying that, 

 within reasonable bounds, w r e can recover the 

 effects of exhaustion by proper food and rest ; 

 which, as a fact, people are pretty well acquainted 

 with. The error to be avoided is, in any shape, 

 to make such a pull on the constitution as to be 

 beyond the reach of recovery. Life-force, or 

 call it protoplasm, is an inherent quantity not to 

 be heedlessly wasted ; and this truth becomes 

 more apparent the older we grow. Why is one 

 man greater, in the sense of being more powerful 

 than another? Because he knows how to get 



out of himself a greater amount of work with less 

 waste of life-force. 



We see from experience that the more men 

 have to do the more they can do. And this para- 

 dox is only reasonable, for it is the necessity of 

 great work that forces upon us systematic habits, 

 and teaches us to economize the power that is in 

 us. With the cares of an empire on their shoul- 

 ders, prime-ministers can make time to write 

 novels, Homeric studies, anti-papal pamphlets. 

 It is the busy-idle man who never loses an oppor- 

 tunity of assuring you that " he has not a moment 

 in the day to himself, and that really he has no time 

 to look round him." Of course idle people have 

 no time to spare, because they have never learned 

 how to save the odd minutes of the day, and be- 

 cause their vital energy is expended in fuss rather 

 than in work. 



" He hath no leisure," says George Herbert, 

 " who useth it not ; " that is to say, he who does 

 not save time for his work when he can is always 

 in a hurry. One of the most sublime concep- 

 tions of the Deity we can form is, that lie is never 

 idle and never in a hurry. 



The following words from a newspaper de- 

 scription of the sublime calmness of power mani- 

 fested by the huge hydraulic crane used to lift 

 Fraser's celebrated eighty-one ton gun, we take 

 as our type of the powerful man who knows how r 

 to economize his vital force instead of wasting it 

 by fussing : " Is there not something sublime in 

 an hydraulic crane which lifts a Titanic engine of 

 destruction weighing eighty-one tons to a con- 

 siderable height above the pier, with as noiseless 

 a calm and as much absence of apparent stress or 

 strain as if it had been a boy-soldier's pop-gun ? 

 When we further read of the hydraulic monster 

 holding up its terrible burden motionless in mid- 

 air until it is photographed, and then lowering 

 it gently and quietly on a sort of extemporized 

 cradle without the least appearance of difficulty, 

 one can readily understand that the mental im- 

 pression produced on the bystanders must have 

 been so solemn as to manifest itself in most elo- 

 quent silence." With the same freedom from 

 excitement and difficulty does the strong man 

 who saves his force for worthy objects raise up 

 morally and physically depressed nation?, take 

 cities, or, what is harder to do still, rule his own 

 spirit. It is the fashion nowadays to say that 

 people are killed or turned into lunatics by over- 



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