We shall best commence the inquiry by directing our attention once more to the fact, so often insisted upon in this work, that the large majority of neuralgic patients carry in them the seeds of their malady from their birth. It has been amply proved that every child born of a family that has shown strong tendencies to insanity, epilepsy, paralysis, etc., etc., ought to be looked on as a neurotic subject, and as a potential sufferer from neuralgia. It has been shown that such children will be exposed, even under favoring external circumstances, to the danger of neuralgia at certain important stages of their physiological history. The earliest of these critical periods is marked by the occurrence of puberty; and it is not till this time that psychical influences, as such, come to have any serious bearing on the formation of the neuralgic habit. Mischief may, indeed, be done to the brain and the general nervous system, by injudicious mental training, at a far earlier period; but this mischief, serious or even fatal as it may be, usually takes some other form than that of neuralgia. It will be necessary, here, to reflect a little upon certain features of the childish mind, in order that we may rightly estimate the kind of influence which puberty exerts upon it. A very young child is selfish, in the purely animal sense; it is greedily acquisitive, and its selfishness is unchecked by any sense of shame. With later childhood there comes a sense of right and wrong, and a sensitiveness to shame, which check this tendency; still it is the exception rather than the rule to find any great capacity of self-abnegation in young school-boys. But a moderately healthy-minded child, up to the age of puberty, is only acquisitively selfish; he is not self-centered in the sense of dwelling upon his own mental state, and reflecting upon the nature of his motives and feelings. It is with the age of puberty that self-consciousness begins to be a feature in the mind of the young, and its appearance marks the entrance of a dangerous element into the character. It is an inevitable stage in mental growth, and, if wisely dealt with, is ultimately productive, not of evil, but of good; but it is more perilous to some children than to others, and it is especially fraught with danger to those whose nervous centres are, by inheritance, weak and unstable in whole or in parts. The mental antidote to its possible evil effects is to be found in a vigorous (but not excessive) training of the mind in studies which shall be as far as possible external, and the discouragement of all tendencies to introspection. I would venture to express the decided opinion that the common idea, that close study injures the young, is only true in a modified sense. It is, however, unquestionably the fact, that hasty and imperfect cram-work does very seriously impair the stability of the brain and the nervous system in young people; there is a spurious