Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/217

Rh and the observer. Heap your field so thoroughly that gleaners must despair. Fortify your position, that your most experienced rival can find no point of attack. Lay your plans with such a superfluity of patient carefulness that Fate itself can invent no serious emergency. Demonstrate your theory so utterly and evidently that it shall require no defender but itself. Die for your work, that your work may live forever. Forget yourself, and your work will make you famous. Enslave yourself to it, and it will plant your feet upon the necks of kings, and your mere Yes or No will become a law to multitudes. This is what the dead-work of science, when well done, does for the expert in science.

My fourth proposition—that only the habitual performance of deadwork can preserve the scientific intellect in pristine vigor, and prevent it from becoming stiffened with prejudices, inapt to receive fresh truth, and forgetful of knowledge already won—hardly needs discussion. Human muscles become atrophied by disuse. Men's fortunes shrink and evaporate by mere investment. I pray you to imagine what I wish to say, for it all amounts to this—that the grass will surely grow over a deserted foot-path. Let me hurry to the close of this address, which I have found too serious a duty for my liking, and perhaps you also have found it too personal a preachment for yours. One more suggestion, then, and I have done.

My fifth proposition was, that the wearied and exhausted intellect will wisely seek refreshment in dead-work.

The physiology of the brain is now sufficiently well understood to permit physicians to prescribe with some assurance for its many ills, and to regulate its restoration to a normal state of health. Its tissues reproduce themselves throughout life if no extraordinary overbalance of decay takes place, if there be no excessive and too long-continued waste. For the majority of mankind, Nature provides for the adjustment between consumption and reproduction of brain-matter by the alternations of day and night, noise and silence, society and solitude, and also by the substitution of the play of fancy in dreams for the work of the judgment and the will in waking hours. We follow the lead of Nature when we seek amusement as a remedy for care. We bring into activity a rested portion of the brain, to permit the wearied parts of it to restore themselves unhindered.

This is the rationale of the pathological treatment of the brain. Tell an overworked president of a railway company, who falls asleep at the directors' meeting, that he must rest, or die of softening of the brain, and he will smile a sad reply that he can not rest. He is right, thus far: he can not rest his whole brain, but he can rest the cerebellum—the seat of the will-power—by bringing into higher activity and more frequent exercise the upper and frontal lobes. Let him stop thinking of leasing rival lines, and read novels and play billiards. Let him ride some youthful hobby, revive his practice on the violin,