O'SHEA — ASPECTS OF MENTAL ECONOMY. 175 



preciate the principle here involved one needs to recall what has 

 been said respecting the hierarchal character of the cerebral 

 mechanism. It is needful to remember especially that the 

 "highest" brain centers exercise a general control over more fun- 

 damental ones and are charged with the management of the peri- 

 pheral muscular activities. Now, it seems to be true, although 

 it has not yet been so proven by extensive experimentation that 

 co-ordination of the peripheral muscles involves a relatively 

 larger expenditure of energy than coarser, less delicately ad- 

 justed movements. Thus fine needle-work is more fatiguing to 

 most women than washing dishes, and "getting pigs out of 

 clover'' is a much greater strain on any man than playing golf 

 or croquet. It is a rational inference, it seems to me, from the 

 known methods of cerebral action that in the majority of people 

 much activity of the third-level cerebral areas, those governing 

 peripheral muscles, results in the setting free of a larger quan- 

 tum of energy than is required to perform the work in hand. 

 Peripheral muscles as they are found in the human organism 

 have appeared relatively late in the development of the race, and 

 the nerve centers controlling them are not yet seemingly, for 

 most people, quite stable. Paths for the discharge of nerve force 

 have not become deeply grooved so that much overflows into by- 

 channels, as it were. On the other hand the fundamental bodily 

 actions have become so habitual that they do not apparently 

 lead to waste ; the neural avenues controlling them have become 

 so fully established that energy generated issues in profitable 

 production for the most part. 



The position here taken is by no means fully warranted by 

 experimental evidence, and there are those scientists who feel 

 that through habit the individual may get to be as economical 

 in the use of peripheral as of fundamental muscles. My own 

 observations, however, lead me to believe that in the majority 

 of cases these conserving habits never become established in most 

 of us. I was able several years ago to gain something relating 

 to this point from the experience of a distinguished physician 

 in Buffalo, a specialist in diseases of the nose and throat. Some 

 of his work involved very delicate operations requiring most ac- 



