On old and young, the pressure of modern life puts a still-increasing strain.  In all businesses and professions, intenser competition taxes the energies and abilities of every adult; and, to fit the young to hold their places under this intenser competition, they are subject to severer discipline than heretofore.  The damage is thus doubled.  Fathers, who find themselves run hard by their multiplying competitors, and, while labouring under this disadvantage, have to maintain a more expensive style of living, are all the year round obliged to work early and late, taking little exercise and getting but short holidays.  The constitutions shaken by this continued over-application, they bequeath to their children.  And then these comparatively feeble children, predisposed to break down even under ordinary strains on their energies, are required to go through a curriculum much more extended than that prescribed for the unenfeebled children of past generations.

The disastrous consequences that might be anticipated, are everywhere visible.  Go where you will, and before long there come under your notice cases of children or youths, of either sex, more or less injured by undue study.  Here, to recover from a state of debility thus produced, a year’s rustication has been found necessary.  There you find a chronic congestion of the brain, that has already lasted many months, and threatens to last much longer.  Now you hear of a fever that resulted from the over-excitement in some way brought on at school.  And again, the instance is that of a youth who has already had once to desist from his studies, and who, since his return to them, is frequently taken out of his class in a fainting fit.  We state facts—­facts not sought for, but which have been thrust on our observation during the last two years; and that, too, within a very limited range.  Nor have we by any means exhausted the list.  Quite recently we had the opportunity of marking how the evil becomes hereditary:  the case being that of a lady of robust parentage, whose system was so injured by the regime of a Scotch boarding-school, where she was under-fed and over-worked, that she invariably suffers from vertigo on rising in the morning; and whose children, inheriting this enfeebled brain, are several of them unable to bear even a moderate amount of study without headache or giddiness.  At the present time we have daily under our eyes, a young lady whose system has been damaged for life by the college-course through which she has passed.  Taxed as she was to such an extent that she had no energy left for exercise, she is, now that she has finished her education, a constant complainant.  Appetite small and very capricious, mostly refusing meat; extremities perpetually cold, even when the weather is warm; a feebleness which forbids anything but the slowest walking, and that only for a short time; palpitation on going upstairs; greatly impaired vision—­these, joined with checked growth and lax tissue, are among the results entailed.  And to her case we may add that of her friend and fellow-student; who is similarly weak; who is liable to faint even under the excitement of a quiet party of friends; and who has at length been obliged by her medical attendant to desist from study entirely.