Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/441

Rh much sleep you ought to have—say, eight hours—and get up sternly when you have been in bed eight hours, however long you have been awake. Increase your air and exercise gradually." A journalist, when suffering from an over-excited brain, and finding his eyes in constant movement, although the lids are closed, resolutely fixes the gaze downward—say, to the foot of the bed—while the lids are kept closed. If his sleeplessness arises from flatulence, he takes a remedy for that. "A most wretched lier-awake" of thirty-five years' standing, who had for ten years thought himself happy if he could get twenty minutes' sleep in the twenty-four hours, took hot water—"a pint, comfortably hot, one good hour before each of my three meals, and one the last thing at night—naturally, unmixed with anything else. The very first night I slept, for three hours on end, turned round, and slept again till morning. I have faithfully and regularly continued the hot water, and have never had one 'bad night' since. Pain gradually lessened, and went; the shattered nerves became calm and strong, and instead of each night being one long misery spent in wearying for the morning, they are all too short for the sweet, refreshing sleep I now enjoy."

The Mental Torpor Remedy.—Complete intellectual torpor is recommended as a remedy for overweariness by a writer who, to sustain his view, brings pertinent illustration to the support of argument. Such a condition is almost superstitiously avoided by hard-working men, who are disposed to regard it as a waste and an idle indulgence. But "there is no more harm in intellectual torpor for the sake of the mind's health, than in sleep for the sake of the body's health; and its duration ought to be governed only by expediency. .. . As to the curative effect of torpor, we have no doubt whatever. So far from the mind being weakened by total rest, or the energies diminished, both wake after a time fully recovered, and repossessed of the old readiness to exert themselves to fatigue. 'I am tired,' says the cured man to himself, 'of doing nothing'—that is, he has recovered the power to do things easily, which is the mark of mental health. The mind itself is, in fact, often positively stronger, having grown in its sleep as the body grows, and having, so to speak, resharpened its weapons, till the 'lazy' mathematician can not only solve his old problems more quickly, but can recollect them more accurately, the mind having gained, as in boyhood it gained, from sleep. We can all recollect how in school-days the lesson of the evening was often best known on the following morning, although, if torpor weakens, we ought in the intervening twelve hours to have invariably lost some slight grip of the words, instead of gaining a fresh one. The memory in particular recovers under this process in the most amazing way, so that even the permanent weakness, the slowness of recollection which comes of advancing years, seems to disappear. The grand gain, however, is in mental nerve, in the disappearance of that apprehensive anxiety and sense, not of strain which is, but of strain which is coming, that, far more than actual toil, however severe, shatters men's powers to pieces. But how is torpor to be attained? Like everything else, by determining to have it—that is, by a persistent resolve to be lazy, to do nothing, read nothing, think nothing, and say nothing, that involves the smallest up-springing of the sense either of trouble or of effort."

Animal Language.—Whether animals can "talk," and men can learn to understand their "language," is the subject of an article by Mr. F. G. Frazer in the "Archæological Review." A critic of the paper denies the human part in the matter, and declares that the supposition that men can learn to understand animals to the extent implied "is a direct contradiction to universal and unbroken human experience." All representations asserting such an achievement as a fact, or assuming its possibility, are vain boastings or imaginings. Yet beasts and birds all utter sounds, and sounds that have meaning to them, and meanings which to a certain extent we can understand. "They all utter, or at least they all seem to utter, the same sounds to express the same emotions. The love-cry of the nightingale, the low by which a cow recalls a straying calf, the grunt of a pig when it sees food, the mew of a cat who wants the door opened—that is, wants to attract attention—the bark