seasons, is
constantly tending too much to the brain.

There has been a most appalling amount of suffering, derangement,
disease, and death, occasioned by a want of attention to this subject,
in teachers and parents. Uncommon precocity in children is usually the
result of an unhealthy state of the brain; and, in such cases, medical
men would now direct, that the wonderful child should be deprived of all
books and study, and turned to play or work in the fresh air. Instead of
this, parents frequently add fuel to the fever of the brain, by
supplying constant mental stimulus, until the victim finds refuge in
idiocy or an early grave. Where such fatal results do not occur, the
brain, in many cases, is so weakened, that the prodigy of infancy sinks
below the medium of intellectual powers in afterlife. In our colleges,
too, many of the most promising minds sink to an early grave, or drag
out a miserable existence, from this same cause. And it is an evil, as
yet little alleviated by the increase of physiological knowledge. Every
college and professional school, and every seminary for young ladies,
needs a medical man, not only to lecture on physiology and the laws of
health, but empowered, in his official capacity, to investigate the
case of every pupil, and, by authority, to restrain him to such a course
of study, exercise, and repose, as his physical system requires. The
writer has found, by experience, that, in a large institution, there is
one class of pupils who need to be restrained, by penalties, from late
hours and excessive study, as much as another class need stimulus to
industry.

Under the head of excessive mental action, must be placed the indulgence
of the imagination in _novel reading_ and _castle building_. This kind
of stimulus, unless counterbalanced by physical exercise, not only
wastes time and energies, but undermines the vigor of the nervous
system. The imagination was designed, by our kind Creator, as the charm
and stimulus to animate to benevolent activity; and its perverted
exercise seldom fails to bring the appropriate penalty.

A third cause of mental disease, is, the want of the appropriate
exercise of the various faculties of the mind. On this point, Dr. Combe
remarks, "We have seen, that, by disuse, muscle becomes emaciated, bone
softens, blood-vessels are obliterated, and nerves lose their
characteristic structure. The brain is no exception to this general
rule. Of it, also, the tone is impair