ish? The due performance
of every vital process depends on an adequate supply of good blood.
Without enough good blood, no gland can secrete properly, no viscus can
fully discharge its office. Without enough good blood, no nerve, muscle,
membrane, or other tissue can be efficiently repaired. Without enough
good blood, growth will neither be sound nor sufficient. Judge, then,
how bad must be the consequences when to a growing body the weakened
stomach supplies blood that is deficient in quantity and poor in
quality; while the debilitated heart propels this poor and scanty blood
with unnatural slowness.

And if, as all who investigate the matter must admit, physical
degeneracy is a consequence of excessive study, how grave is the
condemnation to be passed on this cramming-system above exemplified. It
is a terrible mistake, from whatever point of view regarded. It is a
mistake in so far as the mere acquirement of knowledge is concerned. For
the mind, like the body, cannot assimilate beyond a certain rate; and if
you ply it with facts faster than it can assimilate them, they are soon
rejected again: instead of being built into the intellectual fabric,
they fall out of recollection after the passing of the examination for
which they were got up. It is a mistake, too, because it tends to make
study distasteful. Either through the painful associations produced by
ceaseless mental toil, or through the abnormal state of brain it leaves
behind, it often generates an aversion to books; and, instead of that
subsequent self-culture induced by rational education, there comes
continued retrogression. It is a mistake, also, inasmuch as it assumes
that the acquisition of knowledge is everything; and forgets that a much
more important thing is the organisation of knowledge, for which time
and spontaneous thinking are requisite. As Humboldt remarks respecting
the progress of intelligence in general, that "the interpretation of
Nature is obscured when the description languishes under too great an
accumulation of insulated facts;" so, it may be remarked respecting the
progress of individual intelligence, that the mind is over-burdened and
hampered by an excess of ill-digested information. It is not the
knowledge stored up as intellectual fat which is of value; but that
which is turned into intellectual muscle. The mistake goes still deeper
however. Even were the system good as producing intellectual efficiency,
which it is not, it would sti