Speaking with all seriousness, we have no faith in mental activity purchased at the expense of physical sloth. It is well to introduce into the school, into the family, and into the neighborhood any movement system which will exercise all the muscles of the body. But the educated man is not any more likely to need this general physical development than anybody else. Establish your gymnasium in any village, and the farmer fresh from the plough, the mechanic from swinging the hammer or driving the plane, will be just as sure to find new muscles that he never dreamed of as the palest scholar of them all. And the diffusion of knowledge and refinement, so far from promoting inactivity and banishing recreations from life, directly feeds that craving for variety out of which healthful changes come, and awakens that noble curiosity which at fit seasons sends a man out to see how the wild-flower grows in the woods, how the green buds open in the spring, how the foliage takes on its painted autumn glory, which leads him to struggle through tangled thickets or through pathless woods that he may behold the brook laughing in cascade from rock to rock, or to breast the steep mountain that he may behold from a higher outlook the wonders of the visible creation. Other things being equal, the educated man in any vocation is quite as likely as another to be active, quick in every motion and free in every limb. * * * * * But admit all that is claimed. Admit that increasing intelligence has changed the average of man's life from the twenty-five years of the seventeenth century to the thirty-five of the eighteenth or the forty-five years of the nineteenth century. Admit, too, that the best educated men of this generation will live five or ten years more than the least educated men. Ought we to be satisfied with things as they are? Should we not look for more than the forty or fifty years of human life? Assuredly. But it is not our superfluous sainthood which is destroying life. It is not that we have too much saintliness, but too little, too limited wisdom, too narrow intelligence, too small an endowment of virtue and conscience. It is our fierce absorption in outward plans which plants anxieties like thorns in the heart. It is out sloth and gluttony which eat out vitality. It is our unbridled appetites and passions which burn like a consuming fire in our breasts. It is our unwise exposure which saps the strength and gives energy and force to latent disease. These, tenfold more than any intense application of the brain to its legitimate work, limit and destroy human life. The truly cultivated mind tends to give just aims, moderate desires, and good habits.