that country. These views, however, are based upon insufficient grounds, upon exceptions rather than general laws. 'The pale cast of thought,' the attenuated student, and the proverbial ill-health of men devoted to study—all effects of the excessive wear of robust frames, are assumed to be the causes of superior intellectual power.
An investigation of the personel of men of powerful mind shows them, generally, possessed of great physical vigor. Carlyle somewhere exclaims with huge delight that Shakespeare could have 'struck a right good blow:' and gathers this from the style of Shakespeare. Burns, Scott, Wilson, Macaulay, Berzelius, Davy, Cuvier and our Webster, are a few among thousand of instances. Writers of fiction—Bulwer, for example in Eugene Aram—simply interpret nature when they endow their pale, slender, intellectual heroes with marvelous physical energy. Dr. Metcalfe, in his great work on Caloric, shows conclusively that without a full supply of healthy blood at the brain, the mind cannot be vigorous: and, that in small men, of powerful mind, there will always be found a capacious pair of lungs, producing great physical vigor, as well as the necessary supply of healthy blood. Indeed, a necessary condition, for long continued mental application, is, a vigorous physical frame, for, without such frame or constitution, the body would not be able to endure the wear and tear of hard study.
In this connexion, the observations, or rather experiments of M. Peron, quoted by Quetelet, are curious and instructive. M. Peron, by means of a dynameter, measured the strength of many persons of the following nations, with the following results,
| 14.8 | |
| 16.8 | |
| 22.1 | |
| (On Man, p. 68.) |
In this comparison the intellectual keep parallel with the physical strength. Weakest of all, is the New Hollander, the most debased savage on the face of the globe: next comes the Malay, of, doubtless, Indian origin, and endowed with some advances beyond barbarism: strongest of all, by a proportion three times greater than separates the other two are the French sailors, by far the most advanced in civilization and intellectual power.
And furthermore, if we look at the sources whence nations, advanced in civilizations, draw their intellectual power, these sources will be found to spring from the common people—the physically vigorous. England has drawn far more of her intellectual glory from those who win their bread by the sweat of their brows, than from those whose foreheads are gilded by the coronet. The people, we contend, are the source of intellectual as well as of political power; they are not only the bone and sinew, but also the heart and brain of a nation. Each blow of the hammer, each strain of the muscle, every effort of the body, made with a will, stirs anew the current of life, which is also the current of thought, and the soul freshens and grows stronger: hence new thought, the thought of progress, the stirrer-up of true civilization, always springs from the people,—conservatism, from the slower current of the Aristocracy. A people, therefore, whose 'common destiny' is 'labor,' is of necessity destined to advance civilization.
In these remarks, we speak of man, not the individual, but in the aggregate. Take one hundred thousand men in a given portion of the globe, and another hundred thousand in another, and differently climated portion of the earth. Obtain the average strength of each party; and it will be found that the party which produces the greater physical, will also produce the greater intellectual power: it will also be found that this stronger party will live in the climate the better fitted to develope physical vigor in the human being.
