The

The necessity of having to work in masses, in the same building, at the same monotonous ever-repeating labour, in which the muscles are moving with automatic regularity, and the brain is left unemployed except to brood over real or imaginary injuries; these conditions affect life to the core, and exert a fitting effect on the vital value of the working class. agricultural labourer may work hard, may fare badly, may be housed shamefully, but he has many advantages. He is engaged out-of-doors in the fresh air; he has all the beauties of external nature to delight and refresh him. His work is varied. There is the spring-tide season, with its sheep-washing and shearing; the summer, with its hay-time; the autumn, with its harvest; the other months of ploughing and sowing, a constant roundelay of work, with varied change for the mind as well as the body. The artisan has no such pleasures of industry. He passes day by day, month by month, year by year, through the same monotonous labour, until at last his mind recognises but one scene; his hands fall to but one automatic routine. To the end of his career he sees no change, nor chance of being made independent by his skill and his industry. He, therefore, is naturally apt to become fretful, anxious, irritable, the victim of smouldering passions, which wear out his heart, and lessen his nervous resistance to the many

He

external shocks to which he is daily subjected. Moreover, the limitation of his means leads to limitations in the necessary comforts of his home. who is in these straits is rather to be pitied than blamed, if, in false measure of the deed, he seeks, ignorantly, still more sorrow in alcoholic indulgence. When we add together these difficulties of existence, the struggle against penury and actual want, the confined dwelling-room, the badly-ventilated, overstocked bedroom, the indifferent couch, the limited sleep, the ever-returning toil, and the rarity of wholesome relaxation, either of mind or body; when, I say, we contemplate these conditions, we have before us evidence of vital strain which practically is resisted longer than we could, at first sight, imagine to be compatible with human endurance.

Dr. George M. Beard, of New York, in an admirable essay on the longevity of brain-workers, thus felicitously condenses the conditions I have glanced at under this head: "Almost all muscleworkers," he says, " are born to live and die poor. To Το live on the slippery path that lies between extreme poverty on one side and the gulf of starvation on the other; to take continual thought of to-morrow, without any good result of such thought; to feel each anxious hour that the dreary tread-mill by which we secure the means of sustenance for a hungry

household, may, without warning, be closed by any number of forces over which one has no control; to double and triple all the horrors of want and pain by anticipation and rumination, such is the life of the muscle-working classes of modern civilised society; and when we add to this the cankering annoyance to the workman that arises from the envying of the fortunate brain-worker who lives in ease before his eyes, we marvel not that he dies young, but rather that he lives at all."

of

Compare this description and the figures reduced vitality, which show vitality reduced to a full third of its value, with the observations of the same learned author on the longevity of brain-workers, and the contrast is profoundly instructive.

"I have ascertained," says Dr. Beard, "the longevity of 500 of the greatest men in history. The list includes a large proportion of the most eminent names in all the departments of thought and activity.

"The average age of these was 64.20 years."

Madden also gives a list of 240 similar illustrious hard mental workers, and calculates from them an average age of 66 years.

There is no such record to be found elsewhere, and the facts indicate more determinately than aught I know the importance of societies which encourage the extension of the domain of mind; which try to

1

chase away the gross beginnings of human life into the darkness of the past; and which strive to project a future individual life for mankind that shall be worthily a longer, because it shall a purer, and, in the most honest sense of the term, a holier life.

186

VI.

THE WORLD OF PHYSIC.

DECISION of the Council of the St. Andrews

Medical Graduates' Association, that members should invite friends, ladies and gentlemen, to the Annual Address, has imposed on me a duty difficult as novel. Speaking in the name of a body of scholars in physic who are striving to hold an advanced position in their day and generation, I am excluded from dealing with any one of those refined subjects in practical medical science, which could give scope for possible display of the learning of the profession in its own particular walk, but which could not, at the same time, be made of interest to a general assembly. I have tried to meet the difficulty by selecting a subject that shall be common to all scholars and all interests; I mean, the mutual relationships of the communion of physic and the community at large;- The World of Physic and the World'

Did you ever, Ladies and Gentlemen, let your