LATE HOURS.

Otago Witness, Issue 1875, 28 October 1887, Page 32

LATE HOURS.

Our evening amusements always begin and end too late. The usual hours of our operatic, theatrical, and other entertainments are from Bto 12 o'clock. The consequence is that those who frequent them are hardly in their beds before the next day begins to point. They are thus deprived of the quantity of sleep essential to health, 'which requires about eight hours of it for a grown-up person.

The old may nofc want so much, but the very young demand a great deal more. Now, it is not age, but youth which mainly Indulges in these late amusements, and thus those to whom the most sleep is necessary get the least.

Though there may be a few of these young people who can borrow from the day what they have spent on the night, the large majority have no such spare fund of time to 'draw upon. All that they give to the late entertainments they take from sleep, and their health suffers accordingly.

There is no more common cause of physical injury to our youth than late hours. Sleep is necessary for vigorous health. We doubt whether there are 10 in 100 of our busiest young men who are fairly asleep before midnight.

We are sure that the vast majority of them lose, almost every night of their lives, two hours at least of sleep. The loss is ordinarily more than the absolute time they are out of bed, for when wakefulnes.s is unduly prolonged, a nervous restlessness is apt to ensue, which is fatal to soundness o£ slumber. This prolongation of the day far into the night not only deprives us of a beneficent influence of natural sleep, but engenders in all the vital functions of the body a morbid activity which wastes and very soon wears it out.

No one can fail to have remarked, especially in the young, how all their faculties seem quickened when some unusual cause of wakoftilness makes them forgetful of bedtime.

Persons who are habitually stupid at 10 o'clock, will thus become animated by an unwonted intelligence at midnight. It is not only the intellectual faculties which are stimulated by an inordinate wakefulness, but every corporeal organ is roused to an unnatural degree of activity. The appetites and desires are sharped to an excessive eagerness, and their gratification becomes irresistible.

For example, who has not observed how late hours provoke indulgence in eating and drinking ? Who ha,s not been conscious at the midnight supper of a hunger and thirst which the repasts ot the day have failed to excite? This is, of course, a fastness of living fatal to goo:l health and long life. By thus increasing its speed we shorten it. While doubling the days by adding the nights to them, we diminish proportionately itheir number.