titude of things besides, of which he took no cognizance at all when he first entered on his profession as a student. So also the water-drinking Hindoo finds a difference of taste in the waters of different springs, which are alike insipid to the drinkers of beer or wine; and the worker in jewelry and gold ornaments acquires a nicety of touch of which the blacksmith can form no conception. It is, however, in those cases in which a particular sense has never existed, or has been permanently destroyed, that we learn to how great an extent other senses may be improved so as to supply the deficiency. In the earlier part of my life I made acquaintance with a blind fiddler, who wandered about the country by himself attending village festivals; and I remember, among many other things which I have now forgotten, his having described to me how certain feelings, produced, as he supposed them to be, by the pressure of the air, made him understand that he was close to a large tree. Children who have been born blind, or who have become blind, learn to read with their fingers, by means of small embossed characters, in a shorter space of time than those who have their sight do by printed books. They become as familiar with the voices of their acquaintance as others are with their countenances; and it is really true that they not unfrequently wonder why, from being born blind, they should be held to be objects of commiseration. "I remember seeing a little girl three or four years old, who had been totally deaf from the time of her birth, watching her mother as she was speaking. The intensely earnest and anxious expression of her countenance when she was thus occupied was almost painful to behold; but the result was, that by a close attention to the motion of the lips, and, as I presume, by observing those smaller movements of the features which are unnoticed by others, she was enabled to obtain a competent knowledge, not indeed of what her mother said, but of what she meant to say. Examples of this kind may be supplied without end. There are few professions, and few pursuits in life, which do not require that some one organ of sense should be in a state of greater perfection than the rest; and each individual accordingly trains and educates that of which he is most in need, though he himself is unconscious that he is doing so. "The organs of sense are as much physical machines as the telescope, or the microscope, or the ear-trumpet; and in like manner, as the muscles become more developed, more vascular, and larger by being exercised, so it is not improbable some such actual changes take place in the organs of sense also, rendering them more adapted to the purposes for which they are designed. But this does not explain the whole. Any one who enters on the study of minute anatomy, or what they are pleased to call histology (we are very fond in these times of inventing new names for old things), by means of the microscope, is at first very awkward in the use of the instrument. By degrees he understands it better, and is enabled to see what he could not see, or at any rate did not comprehend, in the beginning. So it is with regard to the organs of sense. We are clumsy in applying them to a new purpose, as we may be clumsy in our first attempts with an optical machine, but by diligence and attention we become more dexterous. What I am about to mention is no rare occurrence, and will serve to explain what I believe to be the correct view of the subject. A gentleman, who heard perfectly well with one ear, was thoroughly convinced that he had been entirely deaf with the other ear from the time of his being a child. By and by he became affected with a severe inflammation of the sound ear, and, when this had subsided, he discovered to his dismay that he had become quite deaf on this side also. After some time, however, on his being compelled to make a trial of what he called his deaf ear, he found that it was not really so useless as he had supposed it to be. By constant attention to the neglected organ, his capability of hearing with it gradually increased, and to such an extent that, with the help of an ear-trumpet, he could hear sufficiently well for the purposes of conversation." From this the reasoning passes to the power of the will over the passions, to the power also of selecting those suggestions of the fancy upon which attention shall be fixed, and that are therefore to abide in memory. "The power of continued attention differs very much in different individuals, according to the original construction of their respective minds. Thus in the case of two boys, apparently under similar circumstances, we may find one of them to have great difficulty in fixing his attention long enough to enable him to understand the simplest proposition in geometry, while the other accomplishes the same thing with no difficulty at all. But here also the defect under which the one labors may be in a great degree supplied by education and practice, while the advantage which the other naturally possesses may be lost by neglect. young man who has not been trained to gain knowledge by reading, will complain that, after he has read a few pages, his mind becomes A medium of association through which all those ill-defined, half-faded forms had travelled up to light; my nurse and nursery events associated with that paper pattern being, after all, but very faintly pictured on the field of my remembrance." bewildered, and he can read no longer; and I have known even those who have been well educated originally to make the same complaint, when, from being constantly engaged in the active pursuits of life, they have for many years neglected the habit of reading. On the other hand, the boy who is supposed to have no head for mathematics may by conThe discussion of memory tends, of course, stant practice become a competent mathe- to a practical application of what is said to matician. It is the same in his case as in self-improvement. The sort of memory to that of the imagination. The mind is kept cultivate is well defined :fixed on one object, or succession of objects, by an effort of the will; and the more we are habituated to make the effort, the more easy it becomes to make it." Some pleasant and practical discussion on memory includes a good illustration of the association of ideas upon which it so much depends, in this experience narrated by a clergyman : 6 "When I was about fifteen years of age I went, with my father and mother and other friends, on a tour through Somersetshire; and having arrived at Wellington, where I had certainly never been before, we tarried an hour or two at the Squirel' Inn for refreshments. On entering the room where the rest of the party were assembled, I found myself suddenly surprised and pursued by a pack of strange, shadowy, infantile images, too vague to be called recollections, too distinct and persevering to be dismissed as phantasms. Whichever way I turned my eyes, faint and imperfect pictures of persons once familiar to my childhood, and feeble outlines of events long passed away, came crowding around me and vanishing again in rapid and fitful succession. A wild reverie of early childhood, half illusion, half reality, seized me, for which I could not possibly account; and when I atempted to fix and examine any one of the images, it fled like a phantom from my grasp, and was immediately succeeded by another equally confused and volatile. I felt assured that all this was not a mere trick of the imagination. It seemed to me rather that enfeebled memory was, by some sudden impulse, set actively at work, endeavoring to recall the forms of past realities, long overlaid and almost lost behind the throng of subsequent events. My uneasiness was noticed by my mother; and when I had described my sensations, the whole mystery was speedily solved by the discovery that the pattern of the wall-paper in the room where we were seated was exactly similar to that of my nursery at Paddington, which I had never seen since I was between four and five years of age. I did not immediately remember the paper, but I was soon satisfied that it was indeed the "If it be really true that the Spanish theologian, Francis Suarez, knew all St. Augustine's works by heart, it does not appear that this was ever productive of any real good either to himself or to any one else. I did not myself know the individual; but I have been informed, on what I believe to be very good authority, of an instance of a young man who, after once or twice reading it, could repeat a rather long ballad, and yet, when he had done so, did not know the meaning of it. The memory which really leads to great results is that which is founded not on mere juxtaposition, but on the relations which objects and events have to each other one suggesting another, so that they present themselves not as insulated facts, but as parts of a whole. It is this kind of memory which distinguishes the philosophical historian from the dry narrator of wars and treaties, and party politics; which opens to the view of the scientific inquirer those resemblances and analogies by means of which he is enabled, in the midst of apparent confusion and complexity, to trace simplicity and order, and to arrive at a knowledge of the general laws which govern the phenomena of the universe; and which leads those whose genius takes another course 'to find in poetry its own exceeding great reward,' or to look for the good and the beautiful in everything around them;' at the same time that they become the benefactors of mankind, by transmitting wise thoughts and noble sentiments to the generations which come after them." Much is well written of the education of circumstances and of the variety among the aptitudes of men. But at the root of all is watchful work-divested of all hindrances of self-conceit : "The most retentive memory, the quickest perception, nay, even the soundest judgment, will of themselves lead to no grand results. For these not only is labor required, but it must be persevering labor, not diverted from one object to another by caprice or the love of novelty, but steadily pursuing its course amid failures and disap pointments. In fact, if there be anything thus graphically describes the feelings with which deserves the name of genius, those which you have rather incautiously designated as minor qualities are an essential part of it. Without them there would have been no advancement in Science, no improvement in Art; or, to express what I mean to say in a few words, there would have been nothing of what constitutes the higher form of civilization. "There is one other quality not less essential than those of which I have just been speaking. For this I can find no other English name than that of humility; though that does not exactly express my meaning. It is that quality which leads a man to look into himself, to find out his own deficiencies and endeavor to correct them, to doubt his own observations until they are carefully verified, to doubt also his own conclusions until he has looked at them on every side, and considered all that has been urged, or that might be urged, in opposition to them. It is such habits as these which lead to the highest distinction, for they lead to a knowledge of the truth and to self-improvement. There is no other foundation for a just selfconfidence. In this sense of the word the greatest men are humble. They may be proud-they are sometimes even vain; but they are never conceited." The third dialogue opens with discussion of the power we have of counteracting by a voluntary effort any unwholesome influence of outward circumstances on the mind. which he had to contend: If I have any reputation in this way, I have earned it dearly, for no one ever endured more anxiety and sickness before an operation; yet, from the time I began to operate, all uneasiness ceased. And if I have had better success than some others, I do not impute it to more knowledge, but to the happiness of a mind that was never ruffled or disconcerted, and a hand that never trembled during any operation.' The commander of a merchantvessel labored under a frightful local disease, of which it is unnecessary for me to describe the particulars. On his voyage homeward he was overtaken by a storm, during which it required the utmost energy and skill to preserve his vessel and its crew. For two or three successive days and nights he was constantly on the deck, watching everything and directing everything, as if he had been in the most perfect health. Then the storm subsided; he was again conscious of the sufferings occasioned by his complaint, and he returned home to die. In one of our former conversations, I referred to an observation of Lord Chesterfield, that many a battle had been lost because the general had a fit of indigestion; and I presume that this may have been true as to such a Sybarite as Vendôme is represented to have been, but I cannot believe it to be at all applicable to great officers, such as Napoleon, Nelson, or Wellington.". Here we pause for the present, but we shall return to the book for a few more strains of its delightful wisdom. We return to this book for a few more notes of the course of its argument for a man's studious inquiry into the extent of his own powers of self-management. The veriest trifler has a meaning in his emptiness. " here re-appears: and the "used-up man the ennui caused by a superabundance of leisure, and the absence of demand for the vigorous exercise of any faculty, being recognized as one of the real calamities of life. "No one, until he has been, as it were, compelled to make the necessary effort, can be aware to how great an extent the power of self-control is within our reach. It is not much to say that one whose state of health renders him fretful and peevish in his own family, may show no signs of his irritable temper when in the society of those with whom he is less intimately acquainted. On much greater occasions than this, the welltrained mind will come forth triumphant from a contest with the physical infirmities of our nature. A barrister of my acquaintance, who afterwards rose to the highest honors of his profession, was subject to a trine of a necessity that governs actions, and No practical weight is allowed to the docneuralgic disease, which so affected him that it often happened, when he had to advocate we are reminded of the late Baron Alderson's an important cause, that he entered the words in a charge to a jury, "The prisoner court in a state of most intense bodily suf- is said to have labored under an uncontrollafering. But his sense of duty was greater ble impulse to commit the crime. The anthan his sense of pain, and the latter was swer to which is that the law has an equally almost forgotten as long as the necessity for uncontrollable impulse to punish him.” exertion lasted. The famous Cheselden, who at the same time that he was a man of sci- "In short, whatever our speculative opinence was also the most distinguished operations may be, practically we are all constrained ing surgeon of the age in which he lived, to acknowledge that, however much our in ward over those common sources of happiness, mental and bodily health. The book is far too wise to be pedantic, and it touches upon fundamental truths with a simplicity that to the unthoughtful will sometimes make them seem commonplace. Of care of the bodily health, for example, Sir Benjamin wrote : tellectual and moral character may be influ- showing how "the well-trained mind will enced by external causes, more depends on come forth triumphant from a contest with ourselves than on anything besides. This the physical infirmities of our nature," and great truth cannot be too strongly impressed how it lies with ourselves to keep watch and on the minds of younger persons by all those to whom the business of education is entrusted, whether it be parents, or tutors, or religious instructors. The wise man, having once learned this lesson, continues to educate himself during the whole period of his life." Equally sound and practical is the refusal to assume that a man's intellectual faculties and his emotions and passions form two separate and independent systems. One is as necessary to the other as the heart to the liver, of which, if you take one away, there is an end of the entire system. "The mind may be in different conditions, and is constantly passing from one of these conditions to another; but it is always one and the same mind, and, in whatever state it may exist at the time, subject to the same influences. Thus, to take a familiar instance to which I have adverted in one of our for mer conversations, in an aggravated case of gout, where there is an unusual accumulation of lithic acid in the blood, the temper is peevish and fretful; fits of anger are produced without any adequate provocation, at the same time that, the capability of continued attention being impaired, the reasoning faculty and the judgment are rendered imperfect. So, also, where, from the want of a due supply of food, there is an insufficient production of the nervous force, it is not in one respect, but in all respects, that the mind suffers. In the latter case the impoverished blood is deprived of those properties without which it is incapable of maintaining the functions of the nervous system; while in the former case it is not that anything is wanting, but that there is an undue proportion of one of the materials of which the blood is composed, and that to such an extent that it actually operates as a poison." From this consideration follows a discussion of the power over the mind exercised by the state of the blood under the influence of wine or tobacco. Tobacco smoked in excess Sir Benjamin thought more deleterious than opium, and more productive of disease. We have not space to pursue much farther the train of reasoning by which one of the greatest of English surgeons, after many studies and the widest intercourse with men, summed up at fourscore, in the last year of his life, the wisdom he had acquired. He does not declare all vanity, but dwells upon the power each man holds over himself, in "The subject has been treated of, in one way or another, by a multitude of medical writers, who tell you how to eat and drink and sleep, and everything else. But I do not much advise you to read their books, lest you might be perplexed by the discrepancy of the opinions which they contain. Thus I have in my mind at present three treatises on diet, in each of which there is a list of proscribed articles of food. But these lists all, you would find very little left to eat. are different, and if you were to adopt them Some very simple rules indeed are all that apply them as well as he can to himself. A can be suggested, and each individual must reasonable indulgence, without the abuse, of the animal instincts; a life spent in a wholein the open air; with a due amount of mus some atmosphere, and as much as possible cular exercise. Really there is little more to say." The melancholy dependent on deficient nervous power, curable not by mental effort, but by rest and proper food, is associated with the depression following excess in wine, opium, or tobacco, that has too rapidly excited and exhausted nervous force. The deficient exercise of nervous force produces the depression of ennui in the unoccupied man, body and mind acting and reacting on each other. The chapter on Education, forming the fifth dialogue, is full of soundest thought. At the root of training of the young, Sir Benjamin, like a true man and sound philosopher, placed this : "To begin at the beginning. It seems to me that the first thing is that a young person should be made to understand the value of truth, not only that he should never deviate should on all occasions desire to learn the from the rule of telling the truth, but that he truth, and do this to the best of his ability, not considering whether the result will be agreeable and convenient or otherwise. Not only is this the surest foundation of the moral tainties. How many crude notions must have passed through Newton's mind before he completed the invention of fluxions! So it is with all other human pursuits, whether it be in the case of Marlborough or Wellington arranging the plan of a campaign, or of Columbus directing his course over the hitherto unexplored Atlantic Ocean, or of Watt engaged in the invention of the steam-engine. Wherever great things are accomplished, it is the imagination which begins the work, and the reason and judgment which complete it." virtues, but without it the exercise of the not with probabilities, but with absolute cerintellect, on whatever it may be employed, can lead to no satisfactory result. This, you may say, is a matter so obvious that it scarcely deserves an especial notice; and yet it is to the want of a thorough conviction as to the value of truth, and the amount of labor and caution required for its attainment, that we may trace a large proportion of the disappointments to which we are liable in the ordinary concerns of life, as well as the many erroneous notions which have been from time to time propagated, and the fact that many things which at various times have passed for knowledge in the world have proved in the end no better than a sham and an imposture." The next business of education is not so much to communicate facts dogmatically as to cultivate the powers of attention, industry, and perseverance. Care must be taken also, throughout, to cultivate the imagination as "the great, the transcendent faculty of the human mind." The book closes with two excellent dialogues, one on man's place in the world, which treats in a liberal and philosophical spirit of natural theology and recent theories; the other on the possible advances of civilization, and the hypothesis of the “indefinite perfectibility" of the human race. Here Brodie held firm to the teachings of experience, and his little book ends by giving a new turn to such speculation, in asking "As the imagination is the essential part whether man be so perfect a crowning work of the genius of the poet, presenting to him that he may not, perhaps, be followed in posanalogies and relations which are not per- session of the earth by creatures standing ceived by ordinary minds, so it is the main higher in the system of the universe. But instrument of discovery in science and of in-with this the mature and shrewd philosopher vention in the arts. To the philosopher who enters on a new field of inquiry, it furnishes falls back upon the consideration from which those lights which illuminate his path and he had set out, that it is for us to learn lead him onward in his journey,-fallacious where our "inquiries should end, and not to lights indeed if he trusts implicitly to them, but far otherwise if he takes them for no more than they are worth, not supposing that they can in any degree supersede the necessity of strict observation and a hesitating and a cautious judgment. Such is the history of all the great achievements in the inductive sciences; nor is it otherwise even with those sciences in which we have to deal, bewilder our minds by the endeavor to penetrate into regions beyond the reach of the human intellect." So ends a book of which the treatment corresponds to a subject that is defined by one of the imaginary speakers in the dialogue as "not above the comprehension of the humblest capacity, nor beneath the notice of the loftiest intelligence." PROFESSOR BACHE, connected with the United States' Coast Survey, in a recent article on the physiology of sea-sickness, advances the idea that this torment of ocean travellers is a disease of the brain, and not of the stomach. His view is that it is owing to the fact that the mind is not able to understand the varying motions of the vessel as rapidly as the senses feel them, thus causing a conflict of impressions, and a consequent affection of the brain, which in turn deranges the nervous system and produces nausea. As soon as the mind can conceive the idea of such motion as soon as it is felt, sea-sickness ceases. The deck is consequently the best place for one suffering, as there the sight can be best educated to the movements of the vessel. A LETTER to the Pope has been published at Turin bearing the signatures of 8,948 of the Italian clergy, praying his holiness to renounce the temporal power. · |