MERCURIAL BRAINISM OF THE PRESENT EPOCH.

GREAT vital dangers are overshadowing the general mind and heart of the present era. A high-wrought mental action, engendering a powerful reactionary impulse, is burning in the very soul of our civilization. Velocity, together with a condensation of various sensational vibrations, at whatever cost or risk, are at a high premium.

"In a word," says this half-breathless epoch, "tell what you can do, and how quick you can do it!"

The politician proudly responds:

"I am iron-clad, Sir! Can write hundreds of letters, make scores of speeches, bolt my meals at irregular hours, travel faster in fewer days, talk more hours in private, sleep less than any man of my acquaintance, and yet my health is in prime condition."

The man of muscular locomotion replies:

“I will place myself under the guidance and advice of an experienced trainer, and accomplish the task of walking a hundred and twelve miles within twentyfour consecutive hours, and continuing until I have

walked a distance of four hundred miles within five

consecutive days."

The railroad man replies:

"I am proud of our achievements, Sir! Our engineer has made the fastest railroad time on record. He ran a full passenger train ninety miles in one hundred and ten minutes, including four stops. He ran sixteen miles during the same trip in twenty-two minutes, and passed three mile-posts (two full miles) in one minute and forty-six seconds."

Intellectual concentrations and emotional intensities, regardless of the just and imperious demands of the brain and physical system, are cultivated and classed among "the cardinal virtues." Every mind is irresistibly agitated and frenzied by the feverish excitement which everywhere positively abounds. Day and night, in places of business and at home, in theatres and in churches, the motion-mania dogs the footsteps of every man, woman, and child. Repose of the personal life is repudiated and stigmatized as "played;" a quiet, systematic style of thinking and working is condemned as "old-fogy;" and a reverent regard for physical rights as well as for mental rights is sneered at as an ungodly leaning toward "muscular Christianity."

Brain, not intellect, is in the ascendant. Persons are, consequently, nervously emotional and brilliantly

intellectual, while they are in reality thin-hearted and feebly intelligent. They display a marvellous brainand-nerve activity, while they betray a corresponding amount of soul-and-spirit inefficiency or approaching debilitation. Whatever is materialistic is over-done; while the truly spiritual is neglected as altogether “unprofitable." It is impossible by ordinary means to bring the velocimaniacs to a safe and healthy rate of speed. They come to a horrible, jolting halt when offended nature presses down her breaks called paralysis, nerve-pain, heart-disease, insanity.

An observer of Nervous Diseases, Dr. S. W. Mitchell, says: "Next to over-tasked men of science, manufacturers and certain classes of railway officials are the most liable to suffer from nervous exhaustion. After these come merchants in general, brokers, etc.; then less frequently clergymen; still less often lawyers, and more rarely doctors; while distressing cases are apt to occur among the over-schooled young of both sexes. The worst instances to be met with are among young men suddenly cast into business positions involving weighty responsibility."

"I feel so tired," is a common expression. The stomach is weak, the back is lame, the brain is over-worked. Eagerness for Reputation, strife for Fortune, madness for Success. The author of the Caxton Family comes

with these words: "The politician, the professional man, the merchant, the speculator-all must experience that strain of special faculties in the direction towards special objects, out of which comes nervous exhaustion, with all the maladies consequent on over-stimulus and prolonged fatigue. Horace is a sound pathologist when he tells us that, after Prometheus had stolen fire from heaven, a cohort of fevers, unknown before, encamped themselves on earth. In our audacious age, we are always stealing new fire, and swelling the cohort of fevers with new recruits. The weary descendant of Iapetus droops at last the stolen fire begins to burn low-the watchful cohort pounces on its prey. The doctor is summoned, hears the case, notes the symptoms, and prescribes-repose.

"But repose is not always possible. The patient cannot stop in the midst of his career-in the thick of his schemes. Or, supposing that he rush off to snatch a nominal holiday from toil, he cannot leave Thought behind him. Thought, like Care, mounts the steed and climbs the bark.

"A brain habitually active will not be ordered to rest. It is not like the inanimate glebe of a farm, which, when exhausted, you restore by the simple precept, 'Let it lie fallow.' A mind once cultivated will not lie fallow for half an hour. If a patient, habituated to

reflection, has nothing else to meditate, his intellect and fancy will muse exclusively over his own ailments;— Muse over a finger-ache and engender a gangrene. What, then, should be done? Change the occupation, vary the culture, call new organs into play; restore the equilibrium deranged in overweighting one scale by weights thrown into another."

The almighty struggle of this epoch is for outward Wealth. The maddening spirit of the age is "electricity." This principle of intrinsic goodness has been by man converted into the fiery prince of all the dark and diabolical "powers of the air." Men fancy they have scientifically caught and commercially harnessed their absolute master. And yet he cracks his whip of live lightning over all our heads; he teaches and insists that we shall do everything with lightning speed!

Obediently, we race and rush and push with wild, headlong energy into everything and over everything we undertake to do or conceive a fancy for. We immediately begin to over-work, and over-eat, and overdrink, and over-chew, and over-smoke, and over-live, and at last, when too late, we discover ourselves to be over-dead in multitudinous trespasses and sins.

Impatience, the fiendish hand-servant of insanity, is coming by "lightning express." The wickedest demon of our day is the imp of impatience. He attacks the