Just here we may consider whether a man may rise above ill-luck, may conquer it, may turn it into good fortune. The ancients evidently believed that he could; that is why they represented Fortuna’s wheel as turning. Its rotation may not only “lower the proud”, as Tennyson puts it, but may also elevate the humble--change a run of ill-luck into a “lucky strike”. The Psalmist ascribes both these functions to the Almighty himself. “_Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles_”. All this was occult to them of old time; it need be so to us only in the sense that occult means “hidden”. If the hidden causes of a man’s ill luck may be revealed to him, wholly or partially, by study, or even if he can make a plausible guess at them, and if he finds that they are within his control, he can of course mitigate them or perhaps abolish them. I greatly fear that in most cases of this kind they are beyond his regulation, either because they are congenital or because they are due to habits so ingrained that changing them is impossible. The very fact that he attributes his failures to “luck” shows that he has made some effort to get at the cause and has failed in that, as in other things. The use of the word “luck” enables him to keep his self-respect. It does not, however, make him a more valuable assistant, and his superiors must not fail to take it into account in an estimate of his work. I believe that some inquiry into possible physical causes may repay us. Teachers tell us of cases where incredible stupidity turned out on examination to be due to deafness. I personally knew of a maid servant whose apparently idiotic actions were caused by near-sightedness. She did not know--poor girl--that her eyes were not perfectly normal. In all such cases treatment of the physical cause, if it is treatable--alters the “run of luck” at once. All of our libraries should have medical officers, as the New York Public Library has, and the members of the staff should be periodically inspected. There should be a rigid physical examination on entrance.