632 THE HUMAN BODY. 



The brain, like the muscles, is improved and strengthened 

 by exercise and injured -by overwork or idleness; and just as 

 a man may specially develop one set of muscles and neglect 

 the rest until they degenerate, so he may do with his brain; 

 developing one set of intellectual faculties and leaving the 

 rest to lie fallow until, at last, he almost loses the power of 

 using them at all. The fierceness of the battle of life nowa- 

 days especially tends to produce such lopsided mental de- 

 velopments; how often does" one meet the business man, so 

 absorbed in money-getting that he has lost all power of ap- 

 preciating any but the lower sensual pleasures; the intel- 

 lectual joys of art, science, and literature have no charm for 

 him; he is a mere money-making machine. One, also, not 

 unfrequently meets the scientific man with no appreciation 

 of art or literature; and literary men utterly incapable of 

 sympathy with science. A good collegiate education in early 

 life, on a broad basis of mathematics, languages, and the 

 natural sciences, is a great security against such imperfect 

 mental growth; one danger in American life is the tendency 

 to put lads in a technical college, or to start them in business 

 before they have attained any broad general education. An- 

 other danger, no doubt, is the opposite one of making the 

 training too broad; a man who knows one or two literatures 

 fairly well, and who has mastered the elements of mathemat- 

 ics and of one of the observational or experimental sciences, 

 is likely to have a better and more utilizable brain than he 

 who has a smattering of half a dozen languages and a con- 

 fused idea of all the " ologies." The habits of mental sloven- 

 liness, the illogical thinking, and the incapacity to know 

 when a thing really is mastered and understood, which one so 

 often finds as the results of such an education, are far worse 

 than the narrowness apt to follow the opposite error, which 

 is often associated with the power of accurate logical thought. 

 Those who are deprived of the advantages of a general colle- 

 giate education may now, more easily than at any previous 

 period, cultivate mental breadth by reading some of the many 

 excellent general reviews and magazines, and the readable 

 but exact popular expositions now available on nearly all 

 subjects, which are such a feature of our age. Associating, 

 out of working hours, with those whose special pursuits are 

 different from our own is almost necessary to those who 

 would avoid such an asymmetrical development as almost 

 amounts to intellectual deformity. 



