308 NATURE STUDIES. 



easterly wind. (Has it been commonly noticed, or is 

 the experience exceptional in the writer's case, that 

 when the mind has been heavily taxed, blusterous 

 weather produces the effects usually attributed to 

 easterly winds ?) 



Again : some of the forms of irritability due to 

 bodily mischief are not easily distinguished from those 

 due to mental overwork. Thus, a case is related of 

 a young man noted for his gentleness, who, forming 

 one evening a member of a brilliant party (his com- 

 panions being of his own age), was quarrelsome and 

 cross-grained, wrangling with, and in the end offend- 

 ing, everybody in the room. Two hours after he was 

 seized with nephritic torments, caused by a calculus, 

 which did not cease to trouble him till the next day. 

 I can recall an even more striking case of the sort in 

 my own experience. I had been struck by my exceed- 

 ing ill-temper (which, utterly wrong-headed though it 

 seemed, I felt quite unable to control), while visiting 

 at the request of several of the professors of Yale 

 College, the laboratories and technological collections 

 of that institution. I could in no way distinguish this 

 irritability from that which I had learned to regard as 

 the effect of over-work. But it continued (though I 

 ha<J had and availed myself of an opportunity for 

 resting) for more than twenty-four hours. Soon after 

 (for there was an interval during which the sense of ill- 

 temper and despondency passed away), I was attacked 

 by renal tortures, which, unlike those of the amiable 

 young man of the previous story, lasted more than 





