678 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



altered. The man who makes sweets does not just make them 

 and do nothing to induce the public to buy. No ; first he puts 

 them up in all sorts of tempting boxes or packages, then he 

 pushes the sale in various ways. The men who make beers, 

 brandies, etc., not only do this, but they go further, they provide 

 all kinds of places where they shall be taken, they provide the 

 gin palace with all its attractions of club rooms, billiards, daily 

 papers, besides plenty of pretty girls to wait on their customers. 

 Why should we not have fruit palaces where, at reasonable prices, 

 people could get the choicest fruit at any hour of the day ? 



Eve is said to have seen that fruit was good for food. Every 

 generation since has indorsed her opinion, and now perhaps more 

 than ever before the world is waking up to see how good a food 

 it really is. Good ripe fruits contain a large amount of sugar in 

 a very easily digestible form. This sugar forms a light nourish- 

 ment, which, in conjunction with bread, rice, etc., form a food 

 especially suitable for these warm colonies;* and when eaten 

 with, say, milk or milk and eggs, the whole forms the most per- 

 fect and easily digestible food imaginable. For stomachs capable 

 of digesting it fruit eaten with pastry forms a very perfect nour- 

 ishment, but I prefer my cooked fruit covered with rice and milk 

 or custard. I received a book lately written by a medical man 

 advising people to live entirely on fruits and nuts. I am not pre- 

 pared to go so far by the way, he allowed some meat to be taken 

 with it for, although I look upon fruit as an excellent food, yet I 

 look upon it more as a necessary adjunct than as a perfect food 

 of itself. Why for ages have people eaten apple sauce with their 

 roast goose and sucking pig ? Simply because the acids and 

 pectones in the fruit assist in digesting the fats so abundant in 

 this kind of food. For the same reason at the end of a heavy 

 dinner we eat our cooked fruits, and when we want their digest- 

 ive action even more developed we take them after dinner in 

 their natural, uncooked state as dessert. In the past ages instinct 

 has taught men to do this ; to-day science tells them why they did 

 it, and this same science tell us that fruit should be eaten as an 

 aid to digestion of other foods much more than it is now. Culti- 

 vated fruits such as apples, pears, cherries, strawberries, grapes, 

 etc., contain on analysis very similar proportions of the same 

 ingredients, which are about eight per cent of grape sugar, three 

 per cent of pectones, one per cent of malic and other acids, and 

 one per cent of flesh-forming albuminoids, with over eighty per 

 cent of water. Digestion depends upon the action of pepsin in 

 the stomach upon the food, which is greatly aided by the acids of 

 the stomach. Fats are digested by these acids and the bile from 



* Australia. 



