528 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



THE PARLOR-GAME CURE. 



Br Eev. THOMAS HILL, D. D., 



EX- PRESIDENT OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 



SOME forty years ago, a distinguisliecl citizen of Boston was 

 caught, by an intimate friend who entered without knocking, 

 in the very act of reading Bowditch's translation of the " M^canique 

 Celeste." He excused himself for the unfashionable character of 

 his reading, by saying that he had thought he would refresh his 

 memory of his college-days. But the friend drew from the wife a 

 better explanation. The good man was a heavy stockholder in a 

 company which had been almost brought to bankruptcy by the 

 thefts of a dishonest treasurer ; and he was reviving his mathe- 

 matics as a means of diverting his mind from the unpleasant 

 topic, which had begun to weigh too seriously upon him. 



Those who have had no early training in these severer studies, 

 refresh their minds, when wearied with business anxieties and 

 cares, by a lighter sort of reading. The diversion which refreshes 

 and reinvigorates a man must be one that is suited both to his pe- 

 culiar tastes and to the character of the fatigue or anxiety which 

 has worn upon him. That which interests and refreshes one man 

 may weary another ; that which banishes the thought of one kind 

 of trouble, may recall and aggravate the causes of distress to a 

 man whose anxiety or weariness has arisen from a different cause. 

 The " Mdcanique Cdleste " served a good purpose for our Bosto- 

 nian ; while a novel which turned upon a plot involving breach of 

 trust, and the ruin produced by it, would have been only a means 

 of increasing the sufferer's trouble. 



This is the real and substantial value of parlor-games. They 

 serve as means of cure for those sufferings which arise from men- 

 tal causes ; they do so by diverting the mind without overtaxing 

 it. It is true that many parlor-games may be used for gambling — 

 or rather abused — but they are not on that account to be wholly 

 condemned. Indeed, there is, in the very fact of a thing being 

 capable of doing mischief, a presumptive proof that it can do 

 good ; by the correlation of forces, any energy can be turned into 

 a useful channel. A substance absolutely inert would be capa- 

 ble of doing mischief only when present in a sufficiently large 

 quantity to impede the useful action. Keeping to our compari- 

 son of games to medical agencies, we may perhaps get some 

 light from a curious remark of Liebig. His theory, as we dimly 

 remember it, was somewhat to the following effect : When any 

 article is received into the stomach, a contest begins between the 

 gastric powers and the intruder. If they conquer, the article was 



