ged. Force must be allowed to flow thither in an
ample stream, and not diverted to the brain by the school, or to the
arms by the factory, or to the feet by dancing. "Every physician,"
says a recent writer, "can point to students whose splendid cerebral
development has been paid for by emaciated limbs, enfeebled digestion,
and disordered lungs. Every biography of the intellectual great
records the dangers they have encountered, often those to which they
have succumbed, in overstepping the ordinary bounds of human capacity;
and while beckoning onward to the glories of their almost
preternatural achievements, register, by way of warning, the fearful
penalty of disease, suffering, and bodily infirmity, which Nature
exacts as the price for this partial and inharmonious grandeur. It
cannot be otherwise. The brain cannot take more than its share without
injury to other organs. It cannot _do_ more than its share without
depriving other organs of that exercise and nourishment which are
essential to their health and vigor. It is in the power of the
individual to throw, as it were, the whole vigor of the constitution
into any one part, and, by giving to this part exclusive or excessive
attention, to develop it at the expense, and to the neglect, of the
others."[7]

In the system of lichens, Nylander reckons all organs of equal
value.[8] No one of them can be neglected without evil to the whole
organization. From lichens to men and women there is no exception to
the law, that, if one member suffers, all the members suffer. What is
true of the neglect of a single organ, is true in a geometrical ratio
of the neglect of a system of organs. If the nutritive system is
wrong, the evil of poor nourishment and bad assimilation infects the
whole economy. Brain and thought are enfeebled, because the stomach
and liver are in error. If the nervous system is abnormally developed,
every organ feels the _twist_ in the nerves. The balance and
co-ordination of movement and function are destroyed, and the ill
percolates into an unhappy posterity. If the reproductive system is
aborted, there may be no future generations to pay the penalty of the
abortion, but what is left of the organism suffers sadly. When this
sort of arrest of development occurs in a man, it takes the element of
masculineness out of him, and replaces it with adipose effeminacy.
When it occurs in a woman, it not only substitutes in her case a wiry
and perhaps thin bearded masculi