330 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



coincident with adolescence, and is undoubtedly caused in many in- 

 stances by subtile disturbances of the health, due to prolonged school- 

 hours. This is a most troublesome disease, and most varied in its 

 manifestations. In nothing is the connection between mind and 

 body, between function and feeling, better seen than in certain hys- 

 terical conditions. You have a splendidly educated girl according 

 to the modern standard, with a physique that seems very fairly de- 

 veloped, just showing by certain subtile indications that the mental 

 portion of the brain has been made too dominant. You have this 

 girl prostrated in what seems the most mysterious way by hysteria, 

 in one of its hundred forms. You can't actually say what is wrong, 

 but you know that, if she had been brought up in the country, with 

 moderate schooling, and four or five hours a day in the open air, there 

 would not have occurred anything of the kind. It may result from 

 idleness just as it does from over-brain-work, the one being as much 

 contrary to the laws of nature as the other. It is an illustration of 

 the fact that you may have effects produced by wrong methods of 

 education that are not to be detected till they break out in actual 

 disease. If the seeds of disease or the conditions that tend to it are 

 laid by any system of training, it is nearly as bad as actual visible 

 disease. Sometimes it is said about the girls in a school, " Just look 

 at them, are they not fairly healthy for town girls who are working 

 hard ? " But one of the dangers is that we may not be able to see 

 the beginnings of evil, and only by sad experience afterward find that 

 they were there. 



The last kinds of disease to which I shall refer as being a direct or 

 indirect result, in some cases, of over-study under bad conditions, are 

 inflammation of the brain and its membranes, and insanity — the for- 

 mer of which all physicians have often enough seen to be the direct 

 result of over-study ; while the latter may be regarded, in its essential 

 nature, as the acme of all nervous diseases. In it, that highest portion 

 of the brain that ministers directly to mind is disordered, that very 

 portion that in over-education has been forced and crammed with 

 book-knowledge. Mental disease is not common till toward the end 

 of the period of adolescence, but the conditions that lead up to it are 

 common enough before then. The mere acquiring knowledge seldom 

 causes insanity. Its causes in youth are all the conditions of life that 

 accompany over-education, as well as the brain - forcing itself, the 

 want of fresh air, the poor bodily development, the poverty of blood, 

 the deranged undeveloped bodily functions. Insanity in early youth 

 always arises out of some nervous weakness in ancestry. It may not 

 be mental disease itself — for a tendency to neuralgia or drunkenness, 

 or mere nervousness in ancestors, may become insanity in the off- 

 spring, if wrong conditions of life are in operation. But it is often 

 just the children of highly nervous parents — perhaps subject to " nerv- 

 ous depression" — who are quick, precocious, and educable in book- 



