Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 13.djvu/229

Rh advocated by their own party. But no man need be excluded from participation in the common feelings, nor from so much of the public expression of them as is open to all the laity, by the unphilosophical narrowness of those who guard the mysteries of worship. Am I to be prevented from joining in that common joy at the revelation of enlightened principles of religion, which we celebrate at Easter and Christmas, because I think that certain scientific, logical, and metaphysical ideas which have been mixed up with these principles are untenable? No; to do so would be to estimate those errors as of more consequence than the truth—an opinion which few would admit. People who do not believe what are really the fundamental principles of Christianity are rare to find, and all but these few ought to feel at home in the churches.



HEN the editors of Brain sought my aid in the construction of this first number, I felt the honor they did me was not to be lightly refused; but, on the other hand, painfully aware that of late years my life had lain too much in the world to have led me to those results which are won by the patient labor of the student. From direct examination into the finer shapes of brain and nerve of late years, I have become too much estranged; but I trust that observations in the field of practice may compensate, in some measure, the want of closer and more accurate research. On one subject I have long been fain to speak, for it is one in which I am exercised almost daily; moreover, I venture to hope it is not foreign to the purposes of this magazine. Almost daily I am in contention with parents and guardians, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, clergymen and professors, youths and maidens, boys and girls, concerning the right way of building up the young brain, of ripening the adult brain, and of preserving the brain in age. Grievously ill do we take in hand to deal with this delicate member, and well is it that innate development overruns our schemes and brings the variety of natural good out of the monotony of human folly. It is dimly felt by society that the reign of bone and muscle is over, and that the reign of brain and nerve is taking its place. Even the Gibeonites now have the hydraulic ram and the steam felling-machine; the spectacled general of forces fights in his tent by click of battery and wire, and his lieutenant hoists an iron-clad by the touch of two buttons upon his waistcoat; the patient earth forgets the tread of horse and ox, and is ploughed by steam; and ere long, no doubt, our ministers will wind sermons out of barrel-organs, and our morning egg will be broken for us by a wafer of dynamite. Hence it comes that all