Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/50

40 habits, and lonely scenery. I am often reminded of an honest mountaineer from western North Carolina who had found a position in the land-office of his State capital. After a session of the State Legislature he was standing among the spectators that always attend the arrival or departure of a Southern railway-train. "Look there, Harry!" said his companion, "there are those representatives of yours again, going to take the cars back to Marion, I guess. Don't they make you feel like taking an up-train yourself sometimes?" "Well, sir," groaned Harry, "I can stand those delegates tolerably enough, but I tell you, if I hear them cry out huckleberries in the morning, it makes me feel like jumping out of bed and starting for home, sweet home, with my shirt-tails flying!"

"Alas," sighs Montaigne, "for my own native hills, and a strawberry-patch, "autour duquel mon âme n’a jamais cessé d’errer!" May they flourish, the strawberries and huckleberries and the Texas pecans, the peanuts, chestnuts, and maple-trees, and the Chickasaw plums, may they be blessed! Also all johnny-cakes, corn-dodgers, and Tyrolese dumplings, and raspberry puddings, that ever restored health to a stranger or confirmed it to a native! "And above all," says Andreas Hofer in his last address to his countrymen, "beware lest they smuggle in the pottage of Esau with other luxuries of the lowlands; and let your motto be, 'Ryebread and freedom!'"



HATEVER that thing, fact, function, or idea which we call mind may be, or whether the brain, as is generally believed, is or is not its sole organ of manifestation, it is universally admitted that varying bodily conditions are accompanied by related variations of mental states. Aphasia, insanity, imbecility, are so often found accompanied by certain definite pathological alterations in the brain-substance that they are generally held to be symptomatic of such local changes. So, also, though in a more general way, melancholia and depression, as well as exaltations and excitements of the mind, are known to depend largely on corresponding general bodily conditions of retarded or accelerated physiological processes.

It is also held, though in a less definite manner, that the health of the body may be affected, beneficially or injuriously, by certain states