AN ADDRESS TO STUDENTS. 
660 
executed, or, perhaps, than any he will hereafter be called upon 
to perform. He must not attempt to combine pleasure with his 
labours. It is an utter impossibility. He will have, during his 
entire residence in town, a great deal more to accomplish than he 
can possibly master, and every half hour devoted to pleasure is so 
much taken away from necessary study. 
The great secret of a life of mental labour, such as the one on 
which he is about to enter, is regularity — extreme regularity. 
With its assistance, the routine of daily duties ceases to be irk- 
some, every thing is accomplished without pain, and health is 
preserved. The effort which a student is called upon to make is 
not a convulsive one, but continuous ; one which must be repeated 
day after day, for the two or three years which it is destined to 
last, without injury to the health, if possible. Let us see how 
this may be accomplished. 
The brain of a hard-working student is continually at work. 
It is not merely re-acting on impressions passively received ; it is 
actively engaged during many hours of the day, and the consequent 
exhaustion is much greater than under other circumstances. 
Regular rest, therefore, is of much more importance to the student 
than to persons otherwise employed. Instead of diminishing the 
period for rest, as is too often done, he should rather increase it. 
Seven hours’ sleep is enough for a healthy adult, under usual cir- 
cumstances; eight hours is not at all too much for the hard-working 
student. The brain has thus time to recover itself from previous 
exertion, and is perfectly fresh and ready to perform its wonted 
task. A working student ought always to be in bed by eleven, 
and up on the following morning at seven. By rigidly adhering 
to this rule, he will scarcely ever be troubled with the headaches, 
dizziness, and mental unfitness for work which are experienced 
during the day by those who consume the midnight oil. More- 
over, if he take sufficient exercise, and live abstemiously, he 
may study for years — eight, ten, or even twelve hours a-day — 
without injuring his health — a most important fact. He will thus, 
in a given time, accomplish infinitely more than the student who 
works by fits and starts ; sitting up the greater part of the night 
for weeks at a time, and often, by that, means, irreparably injuring 
his constitution. It is not the sudden gush of water, but the drop, 
incessantly falling, that wears the stone. The student who rises 
at seven, and is engaged all day in attending lectures, dissecting, 
and following hospital practice, will find, as the evening draws on, 
that his attention flags, that he becomes drowsy, is obliged to read 
passages twice over to understand them ; a certain proof that the 
brain is becoming tired. When this is the case, study is very 
