"Man's rich restorative! his balmy bath, Or death quite breaks the spring, and motion ends." When weary of labor, thought, society, solitude, study, or anything else, we take to sleep for forgetfulness and rest. No change of activity, no monotonous quietude, serves us in the place of sleep. Sleep is a demand of nature, a nutritious food for the brain and refreshing stimulus for the body. It is the most absolute form of rest which the system is capable of. Without it, to the extent of from five to nine hours in every twenty-four, nervous disorders of every description may follow. Prolonged sleeplessness is an unfailing symptom of hypochondria and insanity. "Whenever, therefore," says Dr. Beard, "we find that we are not sleeping as well as we are wont; when our dreams are peculiarly dark and ugly, and distressing, and leave unsightly scars in the memory; when we roll, and toss, and worry through the watches of the night, anxiously waiting for the day; when we awake long before our accustomed hour of rising, and find no pleasure in the morning nap: then may we suspect that our bark is nearing the quicksands and shallows, and then, without delay, should we examine our charts, revise our calculations, and according to our best judgment, return to the channel from which we have suffered ourselves to be driven." THE BRAIN AND ITS FUNCTION. What a wonderful organ is the human brain! Through it the spirit of man manifests itself. It is but a small portion of our physical nature, but it is the finest portion and the part most closely connected with the spiritual. "Its yielding and sightless mass," says Dr. George M. Beard, "can readily be held in the hollow of the hand; but in comparison with it all wonderful objects of nature sink into insignificance. Place but a minute section of that brain beneath the microscope, and what before, to the unaided vision, was as simple in its structure as a formless mass of clay, reveals itself as a vast congeries of cells, group after group, layer on layer, of every variety of shape, infinite in their number, infinite in their communications, and infinite, too, as we may suppose, in their functions. Subject a fragment of that brain to the tests of chemistry, and we learn that the elements of which it is composed are substantially similar to those out of which are developed thousands of organized products of nature; and thence we are forced to infer that the vast superiority in function and capacity over all other created objects must be due solely or chiefly to some subtle or mysterious difference of molecular arrangement, which neither the microscope nor chemistry has yet been able to fathom." The brain is the organ used by the intellect. Upon its quantity and quality depend the mental and emotional activities of any being. When it suffers an important injury, the exercises of the intellect suffer with it. Too much or too little blood in the cranium, the concussion of a blow or fall, fracture of the skull by which a piece of bone presses on the brain, any of these will produce temporary or permanent injury to the mind's operation such as is not observed when other parts of the body are similarly affected. Again, close your eyes tightly, shut your ears so as to exclude all sounds, yet you can recall the image of any familiar object as of a horse, or cat, and seem, if you wish, to hear the neigh of the one or the mew of the other. Such are some of the simple proofs that the brain is the seat of ideas, the physical basis of intellectual life. By quantity of brain, is meant its weight in pounds and ounces. By quality, is meant the character of its structure, as fine or coarse in matter, simple or complex in formation. A man's brain is much larger and finer than that of any brute. Woman's brain is smaller than man's. Her brain weighs forty-four ounces. A man with no more brain than that is a failure. If he falls below thirty-three ounces he is an idiot. A man's brain should weigh forty-nine and one-half ounces. That of Cuvier, the naturalist, weighed over sixty-four ounces. The physician Abercrombie's brain weighed sixty-three ounces, as did also the poet Schiller's. Daniel Webster had a fifty-three ounce brain, being somewhat heavier than that of Agassiz. The strength of the intellect is not, however, always in proportion to the size of the brain. Men whose mental superiority is undoubted had often brains under the average weight. The cast of Raphael's skull shows that it was smaller than the average British skull; Cardinal Mezzofanti's head was but of the average size; Charles Dickens' head was rather smaller than the average; Lord Byron's head was remarkably small; Charles Lamb's did not come up to the average weight; and it is well known that at the death of Gambetta his brain was found to be smaller than that of an ordinary Parisian laborer. Age has something to do with the size of the brain. Women attain the full weight of brain between twenty and thirty years of age; men about ten years later. At the age of forty-five the brain begins to dwindle, and at sixty the process of decay becomes more rapid. Between eighty and ninety the weight of the brain is probably three ounces less than between thirty and forty. Dr. Le Bon decides that the height of a person has a slight effect upon the size of the brain, and that the weight of the body also has an influence. Dr. J. S. Wight, of Brooklyn, has demonstrated that education tends to increase brain weight. The basis of his conclusion is a series of measurements of the heads of forty-two men and as many women, one-half of each set being educated and the other half ignorant. The forepart of the head is more developed in educated men than in educated women, and also in ignorant men than in ignorant women. The brain of the uneducated male somewhat resembles in size and form that of the educated female. The female skull is smaller than the male, but the brain case, in proportion to the face, is larger. The female brain is thought to be finer, and the average form of it triflingly different, the region of the perceptive faculties being more developed. Because of the finer quality of woman's brain, she is man's equal in most respects, and in some particulars his superior. INSTINCT AND ITS LIMITATIONS. By instinct we understand an inward impulse, or involuntary prompting to action, without an apprehension of the end to be |