reserve capital of nerve force.

We extract the following from an article which recently appeared In the
New York _Tribune_:

AN AGE OF NERVOUSNESS.

The stone age, the bronze age and the iron age, we have heard
of; likewise of the Dark Ages, and other self-marking eras in
human history. As for the present, it might with fitness be
known as the age of engineering, or of electricity, both of
which proud titles it has won by its achievements. Yet there
is also a less roseate view to be taken of it, and another
title to be given to it, based upon its too-evident frailties;
namely, that it is an age of nervousness.

Such is the view taken by the famous psychologist, Dr. William
Erb, of the University of Heidelberg. Nervousness, he says,
meaning nervous excitement, nervous weakness, is the growing
malady of the day, the physiological feature of the age.
Hysteria, hypochondria and neurasthenia are increasing with
fearful rapidity among both sexes. They begin in childhood, if
not indeed inherited. Minds are overburdened in school, with
too much teaching or misdirected teaching. The pleasures of
social life follow, overexerting the already enfeebled nervous
system. Business life is made up of hurry and worry and shocks
and excitements. Society, science, business, art, literature,
even religion, are all pervaded by a spirit of unrest, and by
a competitive zeal which urges its victims on remorselessly.
No man knows repose. The result is, wreckage. The
pharmacopoeia is overcrowded with nerve tonics, nerve
stimulants, nerve sedatives. The medical profession devotes
its best energies to the treatment of neuropaths. And as a
people we are, or are becoming, excitable, irritable, morbid,
prone to sudden collapse through snapping of the overtense
chord of the nervous vitality.

Nowhere are the rush and hurry and overstrain of life more
marked than in this much-achieving Nation. The comparative
youth and freshness and vigor of the American people enable
them to do and to endure what would be beyond the power of an
older and more worn-out community. Yet there is no disguising
the fact that the pace tells even here, and often tells to
kill. True, all the tendencies of the age are in that
direction. Inventions, discoveries, achievements of science,