nal lash to punish his vindictive temper. One whose heart and life overflow with the burning bitterness of envy, no more needs, for the ends of justice, to be pursued with vengeful inflictions, than he does when jaundice, the yellow fiend tinged with its own gall, suffuses his skin and eyes, and shrouds the universe with mournful disgust. Everywhere it is true, that sin finally brings retribution on itself, as the workmen in the quicksilver mines at Almaden at last get salivated, and totter about, the loosened and frightful wrecks of what they were. Evil, automatically organized in a character, or deliberately chosen, is chronically subject to uneasiness and alarm. The sinner may ever say,

"To my sick soul, as sin's true nature is,

Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss."

But always the most dreadful and sufficient compensation of ignorance, vice, and crime is their own nature, as the true punishment of sickness is to be sick. A dissipated, unhappy old glutton and lecher suffering from dropsy, is lixiviated; his misery is a saturating lye, produced by the filtering of the water of organic degeneration through the ashes of habitual sin. Walking the street you meet a man who carries a thousand barrels of beer concentrated in the tinge and pallor of his bloated cheeks; and then straightway you meet another, who has the culture of sixty centuries stored in the soft intelligence of his unfathomable eyes. Would you ask for these men an additional and foreign retribution? Does not every character, every life, contain in itself ample punishment and reward, independent of outward returns? Yes; and generally the vile and hateful soul has the outward returns also. The whole metamorphosis of its life, of essential faculty and feeding circumstances, is in keeping.

"The mind that broods o'er guilty woes

Is like the scorpion girt by fire;

In circle narrowing as it glows,

The flames around their captive close,

Till, inly searched by thousand throes,
And maddening in her ire,

One sad and sole relief she knows :

The sting she nourished for her foes,

Whose venom never yet was vain,
Gives but one pang and cures all pain,
She darts into her desperate brain.
So do the dark in soul expire,

Or live like scorpion girt by fire;

So writhes the mind remorse hath riven,
Unfit for earth, undoomed for heaven;
Darkness above, despair beneath,

Around it, flame; within it, death."

The philosophy of history rests on psychology, the science of mental re-actions, the behavior of the human faculties in their various relations. Many a puzzling and mysterious narrative of the past becomes clear when we read it with the light of physiological and psychical science, the laws of health and disease, in our minds. Then we see how the darkness of ignorance nourishes fear and superstition as oxygen feeds flame. Then we see how the experience of any period or nation depends on its medium, the climate and food of its soul. Trees which are giants on the fat and sunny plain, are dwarfs on the sterile and frosty mountain; so the illusions and irritations which only transiently hover in most minds, in a certain psychical soil and air will take root and grow perpetual. Thousands of strange occurrences are the inevitable phenomena of hallucinated souls whose morbid operations furnish fictitious materials in abundance. For there is nothing in the wildest vagaries of imaginative literature more romantic than in the facts of life; nothing indeed which is not derived. thence. Caspar Frisch, a young German whose trial and execution are famous, having resolved to murder a Jew for the sake of some trinkets he had, while waiting an opportu nity heard an owl screech in the woods at night, whereupon he cried, "Hoot as much as you please, I will do it in spite of your hooting"! Physiological and mental science, anatomical, pathological, and hygienic, throws more light in all directions on history, life, and society, than any other knowledge. It is equally injurious and astonishing, that the study of it, especially in its deeper bearings, is so much neglected. The diffusion and application of a practical knowledge of this science is the genuine means for the material redemption of

mankind. It alone can furnish the direct methods and agencies for the perfecting of the world; the true reforming and healing forces destined to displace the morbid processes, the visionary theories, hitherto in vogue, and which have proved thus far alternately so destructive and so futile. When a universal interest, full of intelligence and faith, can be awakened in these things; when expectant attention, feeling that the desired processes of cure are known, can be concentrated on them, the horrid scourges and sicknesses of mankind will rapidly ameliorate and cease. Attention and faith are the true tractors which, when they are employed with general earnestness, will allay and expel the local afflictions of our

race.

The science of the living frame and of the living mind of man, with all their relations both in health and disease, ought, above every thing else, to be taught to every human being, and the practical inferences from it enforced alike in the conduct of the private individual and in the rule of the great organism of society. The nervous agitations, the hasty empirical practices, the various mistakes and abuses, which may accompany a general unprofessional study of such themes, are hardly to be deprecated at all when we consider the wholesale violations of law, neglects of safeguards, and innumerable other evils, resulting from ignorance. The medical student, when first entering his apprenticeship, is surrounded by such a fearful mass of abnormal relations and morbific matters, that his mind is often infected for a time, and he imagines himself the victim of the various diseases that successively fasten his attention. But this evil, usually trivial, soon remedies itself, and is not worthy of notice in comparison with the evils he learns to avert, to ameliorate, to cure. Many a wretched sufferer from bad or excessive food and deficient exercise, who for years has groaned under a weary train of fretfulnesses and disgusts by day and infernal incubi by night, might have avoided all this wretchedness by a proper knowledge of dietetics based on the science of animal chemistry; might even now by means of such a knowledge exorcise the day-fiend of indigestion and lay him to rest, "unsaddle the

nightmare and turn her out to grass." So will it be with mankind at large when at last they strive thoroughly to understand the metamorphosis of life by earnestly taking up the study of physiology and psychology, comparative and human, statical and dynamical, personal and public. Then alone will they know how to prepare the best conditions for their life, how to modify those conditions in accordance with their true wants, varying as these do with the exposures necessitated by their environment of nature and their circumstances of history. Then, as lead-poison is drawn through the pores by a sulphurous bath, they will learn to extract the deleterious matters clogging the veins and glands of the body politic, and give its wholesome circulations unimpeded way. By their scientific skill, preventive care and love, they will secure public drainage, light, and ventilation, set up hospitals, prepare sanitary cordons, scatter abroad disinfectants wherever noxious effluvia are, and establish a subtle quarantine wherein every harmless seeming lock of wool, which may be freighted. with the plague, shall be subjected to a detersive and antiseptic drench before touching that uninfected cuticle of humanity, all over whose outer walls the phalanxes of health shall be ranged with their gleaming shields of beauty. Through the combined efforts of national governments, which shall cease from hostile rivalries, they will labor to purge the dwellings and rectify the habits of the ignorant poor, to wash and winnow the atmosphere, uplift and filtrate oozy swamps, drive streams of fresh water and pure air through stagnant fens and mephitic vapors, and burn up the seeds of pestilence over the whole globe, from the poisoning sloughs of the tropics to the aching chilblains of the poles. By auscultations of the finest sensitiveness they will seek to discern every mechanical distortion, every functional disturbance, of the public heart and lungs, every congenital defect or acquired excess in the vital organs of society, and to treat them with re-adjusting manipulations and nutriment.

Especially they will apply appropriate tests to discover the adulterations which falsify the popular food and air with such

havocking effect on the health of communities. Poisonous milk from scrofulous cows, pestilential meat, is no worse for the body than poisonous literature from brains surcharged with the virus of moral disease is for the soul. The psychical food on which the minds of the masses of men live is saturated with vulgarity, untruth, morbid stimulus. The works of many writers are wholly innutritious. The writings of saintly authors, like Kempis and Tauler, are manna; of aphoristic authors, like Bacon, spiritual pemmican. "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." The New Zealander imagines he acquires the valor of the foe whose heart he eats. In this gross emblem a profound truth is caricatured; for the soul assimilating examples of courage grows courageous. It would be an incalculable good for the public if no reading could reach them without passing the inspection of a Psychological Sanitary Board who would suppress every thing not true and useful. What quantities of impure sentiment, absurd fiction, raw and prurient thought, would disappear with the destruction of that inflaming and carious literature, that sensational and sanguinary literature, which uneducated fancies devour with such carnivorous eagerness!

The changing year of creation — and its mental reflection in literature is the real tree of life, bearing twelve manner of fruits, and yielding its fruit every month, whose leaves shall be for the healing of the diseases of the nations. Let the human mind feed only on the divine phenomena of nature, and on the thoughts and sentiments of sound writers, and, "thus deeply drinking in the soul of things," almost perforce it would be healthy. Abnormalities, crimes, miseries, would die out; and the valetudinarian world of humanity would rouse itself to its proper energy of harmonized function, its destined exuberance of joy and content. As yet the organic heritage of history in the individual is weighted with the malign biases of egoism, and the atmospheric environment of society at large is loaded with the venom of selfishness. But when, in some far-off happy age of the future, these virulent