In his eighteenth year he was prostrated by a disease which developed into inflammation of the lining membrane of the heart, from which he never recovered.  The verdict of the physician was ever in his mind:  “You may fall at any time as suddenly as from [by] a musket-shot.”  His life was afterwards, indeed, like the life of a soldier constantly under fire.  Instead of making him a valetudinary, this continual liability to death aided to make him a hero.  He acted in the spirit of his father’s advice,—­“If you must die, die in harness.”  Dr. Elder proves that his existence was prolonged by the hardihood which made him careless of death.  “The current of his life shows convincingly that incessant toil and exposure was [were] a sound hygienic policy in his case.  Naturally his physical constitution was a case of coil springs, compacted till they quivered with their own mobility; nervous disease had added its irritability, and mental energy electrified them.  It was doing or dying, with him.  And it was not a tyrant selfishness, a wild ambition, that ruled his life, but a rare concurrence of mental aptitude, moral impulse, and bodily necessity, that kept him incessant in adventure.”  Nothing could damp this ardor.  He contracted the peculiar disease of every country and climate he visited, and was frequently on what seemed his death-bed; but no experience of physical misery had any influence in blunting his intellectual curiosity or impairing the energies of his will.  One of those elastic natures “who ever with a frolic welcome take the thunder or the sunshine,” his whole existence was wedded to action, and he was always ready to suffer everything, if he could thereby do anything.

We have no space to follow Dr. Elder in his minute and interesting account of a life so short, yet so crowded with events, as that in which the character of Dr. Kane was formed, manifested, and matured.  The character itself—­so gentle and so persistent, so full at once of self-reliance and reliance on Providence, so tender in affection and so indomitable in fortitude—­is now one of the moral possessions of the country, worth more to it than any new invention which increases its industrial productiveness or any new province which adds to its territorial dominion.  That must be a low view of utility which excludes such a character from its list of useful things; for the great interest of every nation is, to cherish and value whatever tends to prevent its forces of intelligence and conscience from being weakened by idleness or withheld by timidity and self-distrust; and certainly the example of Dr. Kane will exert this wholesome influence, by the unmistakable directness with which it gives the lie to that lazy or cowardly skepticism of the powers of the will, which furnishes the excuse for thousands to slink away from duty on the plea of inability to perform it.  To the young men of the country we especially commend this biography, in the full belief that it will stimulate and stir to effort many a sensitive youth who feels within himself the capacity to emulate the spirit which prompted Dr. Kane’s actions, if he cannot hope to rival their splendor and importance.