There is another aspect of this subject that I have barely space to allude to. The illustration with which this article opens, touching the effects of hay and grain respectively upon the life of the horse, suggests that the food with which our bodies are nourished may have an important bearing upon our mental and moral life. Of this I have no doubt. Coarse food, made of material but feebly vitalized, makes coarse men and women. Muscular tissues not formed from choice material, brains built of poor stuff, nervous fibres to which the finest and most delicate food has not ministered, are not the instruments of the highest grade of mental life. The dispensation of sawdust is passed away. It is pretty well understood that the most complicated, the noblest, and the finest creature in the world requires the best food the world can produce; and that he requires it in great variety. If a man leads simply an animal life-- eating, working, and sleeping--let him feed as animals do; but if he lives a life above animals, as a social and religious being, then let him take food that gives pleasure to his palate, and pluck and power to all the instruments of his mind. Hay may answer very well for a mind that moves at the rate of only three miles an hour; but a mile was never yet made "inside of 2:40" without grain. LESSON XXIV. HALF-FINISHED WORK. "Ah God! well, art is long! And life is short and fleeting. What headaches have I felt and what heart-beating, When critical desire was strong. How hard it is the ways and means to master By which one gains each fountain head! And ere one yet has half the journey sped The poor fool dies--O sad disaster!" BROOKS' TRANSLATION OF FAUST. Mankind are "nothing, if not critical;" and nothing would seem to be criticism with them but fault-finding. It is astonishing to see what a number of architects there are in the world--how many people there are who feel competent to give an opinion upon buildings in course of erection on the public streets. If a dwelling is going up, there is not a day of its progress in which its builder or architect is not convicted of being a fool, by any number of wise people who judge him on the evidence of a half-finished structure. When the dwelling is completed, it usually "looks better than they ever supposed it could;" but they learn nothing from this, though the proverb that "only fools criticize half-finished work" is a good deal older than they are. Every man who builds is obliged to take this running fire of fault-finding. Passing a new church recently, in the company of an architect, I asked him what he thought of the building. "I can tell better when the staging is down," was his reply. He knew enough not to criticize half-finished work, while probably a hundred men, knowing nothing of architecture whatever, had, during that very day, freely given their opinion of the building in the most unqualified way.