attention it deserves, even from such thorough believers in unconscious
cerebration as Maudsley. As this state of brain is fatal to sleep, and
therefore to needful repose of brain, every sufferer has a remedy which
he finds more or less available. This usually consists in some form of
effort to throw the thoughts off the track upon which they are moving.
Almost every literary biography has some instance of this difficulty,
and some hint as to the sufferer's method of freeing his brain from the
despotism of a ruling idea or a chain of thought.

Many years ago I heard Mr. Thackeray say that he was sometimes haunted,
when his work was over, by the creatures he himself had summoned into
being, and that it was a good corrective to turn over the pages of a
dictionary. Sir Walter Scott is said to have been troubled in a similar
way. A great lawyer, whom I questioned lately as to this matter, told me
that his cure was a chapter or two of a novel, with a cold bath before
going to bed; for, said he, quaintly, "You never take out of a cold bath
the thoughts you take into it." It would be easy to multiply such
examples.

Looking broadly at the question of the influence of excessive and
prolonged use of the brain upon the health of the nervous system, we
learn, first, that cases of cerebral exhaustion in people who live
wisely are rare. Eat regularly and exercise freely, and there is scarce
a limit to the work you may get out of the thinking organs. But if into
the life of a man whose powers are fully taxed we bring the elements of
great anxiety or worry, or excessive haste, the whole machinery begins
at once to work, as it were, with a dangerous amount of friction. Add to
this such constant fatigue of body as some forms of business bring
about, and you have all the means needed to ruin the man's power of
useful labor.