It was thus the young and immature who generally suffered from these epidemics. The impulse of their enthusiasm carried them far beyond the limits of fertility of their tissues, and the ebullience of their delight, as they saw the work grow before their eyes, obscured from them the gradual exhaustion of their powers. They grew oblivious to everything but the end they had immediately in view, and thus became short-sighted in their enthusiasm for progress; they sacrificed the demands of the future for the sake of the present, and it was difficult for even the elders at the medical inspection to get at the real state of the case, such an appearance of new vigour did the impetuosity of their passion and the tumult in their blood give to their systems. Only when the wandering germs of emotional disease had fixed on the exhausted tissue did the result become apparent. The wide area and serious effects of the plague of verbosity awakened the medical elders to the necessity of special precautions. A section of them was organised as a medical police to guard against the invasion of such pestilences, and to prevent such exhaustion of youthful tissues as would invite the vagrant germs or fail to repel their attacks. A science was specialised for this purpose,--the pathology of epidemic emotions; and a special art grew up to correspond,--the hygiene and therapeutics of emotional infection. The elders who attended to this periodically made careful examination of all the tissue of the immature that had to do with emotion or with any crude spiritual moods inapt to the control of reason and will. And it was astonishing how rapid was the growth of the new science and art in their hands. Delicate instruments were invented responding to the presence even in the air of deleterious germs that tended to settle in the nerve-centres. Still finer instruments revealed the state of the tissues underneath the skull. The symptoms of every disease of the emotions were classified, and the means of checking each was investigated scientifically. Before the next period of exceptional florescence and harvest arrived, the hygiene of all the epidemics that had been known to follow on ages of great exertion was completely organised; and it was chiefly an art of prevention rather than of cure. Precautions were taken by the new section of the medicants against the abuse of the enthusiasm natural to such a period; they examined the nerve-tissues of the immature almost daily, and pointed out everyone that was getting overworked, and the remedies that should be adopted for checking the evil. The result was that no abuse could proceed for longer than a day, and no moral or emotional epidemic unless of the mildest type could settle in the community.