Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/55

Rh of those named. For instance, Storrs in his life of St. Bernard informs us that the Hussite warrior Zizka was "half blind from his youth," and achieved his greatest victories after complete blindness came upon him. The truth is, Zizka had the use of but one eye in his earlier life, but as that, so far as we know, was a good one, he was a very long way from being half blind. He did win his greatest battles when totally blind, in his last three years, but he was necessarily surrounded, as every general must be, with faithful and sharp eyes in the heads of his lieutenants. Storr's other infirm hero is Doge Dandola, whom he describes as "blind and bearing the weight of almost a hundred winters when he stormed Constantinople." The Doge was eighty-four, which is some remove from a hundred years, and he was not blind at all. He was really an example of prolonged vigor.

Granting that there are wide deviations from the rule, we would set against the popular notion its antithesis that the intellectual life—that genius, to use that ill-defined but expressive word—is never at war with physical health and strength, but that, on the contrary, as a rule, the greatest men in all fields of endeavor have been lusty persons, and relatively free from serious or prolonged illness, and, where not robust, have usually shown wonderful vitality and powers of endurance. Moreover, they have, we believe, been more careful than the ordinary man to preserve their health, and have often husbanded their energy as the average mortal would not think worth his while.

Genius, of course, is no respecter of bodily tabernacles and takes up its tenancy in all manner of them, from the sickly and deformed to the most heroic and symmetrical, but its light will vary according to its conditions of bodily housing, as the light of a lamp will vary according as its wick is splashed at intervals with fuel of uncertain quality or is constantly bathed in pure oil. The mind of genius has its equally elaborate complement of brain machinery through which it expresses itself, but that brain mechanism depends in turn upon the rest of the body which elaborates, furnishes and keeps pure its supply of energy-material in the blood. It stands to reason that the more well ordered the body, the more active and vigorous will be the organ of the mind, and that anything which depresses the proper functioning of the physiological machinery must impair in so much the product of that organ, both in kind and amount. As there is no line to be drawn between genius and ordinary mental activity, what is true of one physiologically applies as well to the other.

It is quite true that accident or sickness often turns a man to a particular calling. Dickens was always thankful for an early illness which gave him a strong inclination to reading. Had Sir Walter Scott not been in childhood confined to bed with his diseased ankle, he might never have found introduction to the realm of romance which he later