Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER THE TIME OF BT.TP.iirp " Women, like children, require more sleep normally than men, but ' Macfarlane states that they can better bear the loss of sleep, and most physicians will agree with him.' " H. Campbell. THE amount of sleep, like the amount of food, required by an individual varies greatly, depending largely upon the conditions at the time. Edison, for instance, can go days without sleep when engrossed in some invention, and he has been quoted as saying that people sleep too much, four hours daily being quite sufficient. In answer to my inquiry, Mr. Edison's secretary wrote, " Mr. Edison directs me to write you that the statement is correct, that for thirty years he did not get four hours of sleep per day." Evidently, experience taught him that an average of four hours per day, if taken rightly and at the right time, is enough for him. He keeps a couch in his workroom so as to sleep when he is sleepy. He does not need a clock to tell him when to go to bed, any more than you need a thermometer to tell you when to pull up the blankets. Edison is not alone in his views on sleep. He made extensive experiments with the two hundred workers in his own factory which convinced him and most of them that the majority slept much too long. The hands seem to have entered willingly into the trials: perhaps their personal regard for him influenced their conclusions. Napoleon Bonaparte and Frederick of Prussia were both satisfied with four hours of sleep, while Bishop Taylor was of opinion that three hours was sufficient for any man's needs, and Richard Baxter, who wrote " The Saints' Best," thought four hours the proper measure. Paul Leicester Ford, who was never a strong person, once told me that he found four hours' sleep enough for all purposes. He did not wish...