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The great Italian physiologist, Angelo Mosso, gave an account in his book on "Fatigue" of the arrival of flocks of quails on the seacoast of Italy on their northward migration from Africa. The distance across the Mediterranean is three hundred miles or more, and the bird covers this distance in less than nine hours, flying at the rate of eighteen or nineteen yards per second.

When the quail sights land its strength is almost exhausted. It seems to have lost the power of recognizing objects, even though its eyes are wide open. Every year vast numbers of birds dash themselves to death against trees, telegraph poles, and houses on the shore.

Those that have met with no accident lie motionless on the edge of the beach for some moments as though stunned. They seem to have become incapable of fear, and sometimes even let themselves be caught by hand without trying to get away. When they finally awaken to their exposed position, they pick themselves up suddenly and run for a hiding place. But they do not fly. It is days before they will use their wings again.

Fatigue lowers all the faculties of the body. The effects on the other parts of a man are just as important. It puts a chasm between seeing and acting; it makes a break, somehow, between the messages that come in to the brain from the outside world and the messages that go out. It destroys will-power. In every direction it decreases efficiency, forcing the personality down to a lower level.

Fatigue is a destructive agent like sickness and death It is a condition which in the nature of things we cannot avoid; but it is important for us to know what it is and how to deal with it if we want to keep out of costly blunders.

When we are tired out, we are not ourselves. A part of us has temporarily gone out of existence. What remains is something that belongs to a more primitive state of civilization.

Our personalities are built up in strata, one layer added to another. At the bottom lie the savage virtues and vices of our remote ancestors. The code of morals of cliff-dwellers and hunting tribes still holds there. At the top lie the higher attainments of an advanced society - the things that have taken hundreds of centuries to acquire. In men, patience is one of these; modesty is another; chastity, and a fine sense of justice and personal obligation belong in the list too.

Now when fatigue begins to attack the personality, it naturally undermines these latest strata first. When a man is exhausted he finds it difficult to be patient. That is not his fault. It is because fatigue has forced him back a few hundred generations. His self-control is at a low ebb. The smallest annoyances are enough to make him lose his temper.

The same holds true of all the recent character acquisitions. Many temptations are more violent and harder to resist when a man is fatigued. His moral sense is dulled. He loses the vividness of his distinctions between right and wrong, honesty and dishonesty.

We degenerate from the top down. The last thing acquired is the first lost.

Therefore, bodily vigour is a moral agent. It enables us to live on higher levels, to keep up to the top of our achievement. We can not afford to lose grip on ourselves.

The only thing to do with fatigue, then, is to get rid of it as soon as possible. As long as it is with us we ought to realize that we are not our normal selves and to act in accordance. Important questions must not be decided then. It is a bad time to make plans for the future. A man has lost his faculty of seeing straight.

It is often said that the best way of getting rid of fatigue is a change of occupation. This is usually true, but not always. A moderate degree of muscular fatigue will not keep a man from taking up something which will use his brain; and while his brain works, his muscles will rest. But there is a degree of muscular fatigue which makes head-work impossible.

The converse of this is also true. If a man's brain is used up, hard exercise is nothing but a sheer drain upon the system, not in any sense a form of rest. The central battery has run down. The energy supply is exhausted. To force anything more out of it is to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Unfortunately, a good many men have the conviction that they must keep exerting themselves all the time. They call every moment wasted which is not spent in activity of some kind, either physical or mental. Such men are taking the quickest means to burn themselves out. You cannot live well and keep happy under a constant and tyrannical sense of effort. There must be times of play, times to let up the tension, and to do easy and natural things which do not require conscious and exact attention.