PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 305 



appetite manifest a corresponding periodicity, thus saving mothers the 

 trouble of providing baby-titbits at all possible and impossible hours 

 of the day. Healthy children of five take readily to an exclusively 

 vegetable diet, which is often preferable to city milk and always to 

 flesh-food. Xenophon, in his miscellaneous "Anabasis," mentions a 

 tribe of Bithynian coast-dwellers whose children were prodigies of 

 chubbedness, " as thick as they were long," and remarks that said chubs 

 were fed on boiled chestnuts. Baked apples, pulse, macaroni, Avhipped 

 eggs, bread-pudding seasoned with sugar and a drop or two of lemon- 

 flavor, and such fruits as mellow pears, raspberries, and strawberries, 

 can be readily assimilated by all but the weakliest nursery cadets. 



But toward the end of the seventh year the advent of a second and 

 sturdier set of teeth suggests the propriety of exercising the jaws on 

 more solid substances. A child of seven should graduate to a seat at 

 the family table ; or rather the family table should offer nothing that 

 a child of seven can not digest. It does, though, as a rule, and parents 

 who buy their meals ready made, or who have resigned themselves to 

 evils from which they would save their children, should still regulate 

 their bill of fare, both in quality and in quantity, by the rules of hygiene 

 rather than by those of etiquette or convenience, till the age of con- 

 firmed habits puts them beyond the danger of temptation. 



Before entering upon those points, I must premise a few M^ords 

 on the main question. What is the natural food of man ? As an ab- 

 stract truth, the maxim* of the physiologist Haller is absolutely unim- 

 peachable : " Our i^roper nutriment should consist of vegetable and 

 semi-animal substances which can be eaten with relish before their nat- 

 ural taste has been disguised by artificial preparation." For even the 

 most approved modes of grinding, bolting, leavening, cooking, sj^icing, 

 heating, and freezing our food are, strictly speaking, abuses of our 

 digestive organs. It is a fallacy to suppose that hot spices aid the 

 process of digestion : they irritate the stomach and cause it to dis- 

 charge the ingesta as rapidly as possible, as it would hasten to rid itself 

 of tartarized antimony or any other poison ; but tliis very precipita- 

 tion of the gastric functions prevents the formation of healthy chyle. 

 There is an important difference between rapid and thorough diges- 

 tion. In a similar way, a high temperature of our food facilitates 

 deglutition, but, by dispensing with insalivation and the proper use of 

 our teeth, we make the stomach perform the work of our jaws and sali- 

 vary glands ; in other words, we make our food less digestible. By 

 bolting our flour and extracting the nutritive principle of various 

 liquids, we fall into the opposite error : we try to assist our digestive 

 organs by performing mechanically a part of their proper and legiti- 

 mate functions. The health of the human system can not be maintained 

 on concentrated nutriment ; even the air we inhale contains azotic 



* Endorsed (indirectly) in the writinirs of Drs. Alcott, Claude Bernard, Schlemmer, 

 Hall, and Dio Lewis, and directly by Sclirodt and Jules Virey. 



VOL. XVIII. 20 



