Nervousness, that extraordinarily elusive foe to happiness, may arise from two causes, either from an overstrung condition accompanied by excitability, or from exactly the opposite cause--namely, weakness, and the need for tonic. In the first case--the two, again, are unmistakably different--it may be useful to try a less stimulating and irritating diet, and accompany it with plenty of exercise, followed by rest and muscular relaxation. In the second case, the same alteration of diet, substituting nourishing foods for the stimulating ones, and plenty of rest, with perhaps less exercise will be useful. In both cases, of course, medicine may be needful, but it seems to be almost a postulate in the question of health, to prefer, if that is sufficient, a perfectly wholesome _régime_ without medicine, to the continuance of one that perhaps does not entirely suit you, with the addition of medicine. Medicine, no doubt, often is useful, and many of the nerve-tonics which so plentifully bedeck the pages of magazines that one would think that the Empire had an attack of nervous prostration, _may_ be excellent medicines. But why take medicine, if as good results can be obtained without it? It is possible that you must--or at any rate think that you should--do more work than you can properly stand. If the duty is clear, and if it is also perfectly clear that you had better cheerfully give up the chance of working as well as you would like to work, unless you take a tonic, then by all means take a tonic which you know medicinally to be a sound medicine; but first see if there is not some possible means, such as alteration of diet, or, very likely, less stimulant, or a little regular exercise, of managing without that medicine. Strychnine, for instance, cannot be called an ideal food even in the smallest quantities. Two other very common symptoms of some slight nervous derangement are restlessness and staleness. By restlessness we mean the disinclination often amounting to inability to settle down to any one thing. It is a particularly common symptom of the present day, when many people seem to be literally unable to have any fixed object of life, or to remain in the same place for more than a few days together. In acute forms this becomes a nervous disease of such seriousness that a regular rest-cure has been often prescribed--and with great success--for it: the patient goes to bed and stops there for several weeks, and is allowed neither to read, nor to talk, nor to make the smallest exertion that is avoidable. And in a less degree for ordinary restlessness the same treatment is applicable, and an increased allowance of sleep is desirable; or, if not of sleep, of deliberate rest; for the evil is due to over-excitation of the nerves without sufficient nourishment. And the nourishment of the nerves is repose.