Part 33

41. Is chewing tobacco more injurious than smoking?

42. Ought a man to retire from business while his faculties are still unimpaired?

43. Which is the more exhaustive to the brain, worry or severe mental application?

44. Is it a blessing to be placed beyond the necessity for work?

45. Show how anger, hate, and the other degrading passions are destructive to the brain. [Footnote: "One of the surest means for keeping the body and mind in perfect health consists in learning to hold the passions in subservience to the reasoning faculties. This rule applies to every passion. Man, distinguished from all other animals by the peculiarity that his reason is placed above his passions to be the director of his will, can protect himself from every mere animal degradation resulting from passionate excitement. The education of the man should be directed not to suppress such passions as are ennobling, but to bring all under governance, and specially to subdue those most destructive passions, anger, hate, and fear."]

46. Are not amusements, to repair the waste of the nervous energy, especially needed by persons whose life is one of care and toil?

47. Is not severe mental labor incompatible with a rapidly growing body?

48. How shall we induce the system to perform all its functions regularly

49. How does alcohol interfere with the action of the nerves?

50. What is the general effect of alcohol upon the character?

51. Does alcohol tend to produce clearness and vigor of thought?

52. What is the general effect of alcohol on the muscles?

53. Does alcohol have any effect on the bones? The skin?

54. What is the cause of the "alcoholic chill"?

55. Show how alcohol tends to develop man's lower, rather than his higher, nature.

56. When we wish really to strengthen the brain, should we use alcohol?

57. Why is alcohol used to preserve anatomical specimens?

58. What is meant by an inherited taste for liquor?

59. Ought a person to be punished for a crime committed during intoxication?

60. Should a boy ever smoke?

61. To what extent are we responsible for the health of our body?

62. Why does alcohol tend to collect in the brain?

63. Does the use of alcohol tend to increase crime and poverty?

VIII.

THE SPECIAL SENSES.

"See how yon beam of seeming white Is braided, out of seven-hued light; Yet in those lucid globes no ray By any chance shall break astray. Hark, how the rolling surge of sound, Arches and spirals circling round, Wakes the hush'd spirit through thine ear With music it is heaven to hear."

HOLMES.

"Let us remember that if we get a glimpse of the details of natural phenomena, and of those movements which constitute life, it is not in considering them as a whole, but in analyzing them as far as our limited means will permit. In the vibrations of the globe of air which surrounds our planet, as in the undulations of the ether which fills the immensity of space, it is always by molecules which are intangible for us, put in motion by nature, always by the infinitely little, that she acts in exciting the organs of sense, and she has modeled these organs in a proportion which enables them to partake in the movement which she impresses upon the universe. She can paint with equal facility on a fraction of a line of space on the retina, the grandest landscape or the nervelets of a rose leaf; the celestial vault on which Sirius is but a luminous point, or the sparkling dust of a butterfly's wing; the roar of the tempest, the roll of thunder, the echo of an avalanche, find equal place in the labyrinth whose almost imperceptible cavities seem destined to receive only the most delicate sounds."