462 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



hope) of resin, paraffine, and triturated caoutchouc ! Still, Ehrenberg's 

 analysis makes stranger things credible. I do not doubt that a man 

 might contract a habit of swallowing a couple of slate-pencils or a 

 dime's worth of shoe-strings every morning. 



But an innate repugnance to a special dish, or even to a special 

 class of aliments, may be indulged very cheaply, and certainly very 

 safely, as long as there are other available substances of the same 

 nutritive value. Abnormal antipathies may indicate constitutional 

 abnormities, and among the curious cases on record there are some 

 which clearly preclude the idea of imaginative influences. I knew a 

 Belgian soldier on whom common salt, in any combination, and in 

 any dose exceeding ten pennyweights, acted as a drastic poison, and 

 thousands of Hindoos can not taste animal food without vomiting. 

 Similar effects have obliged individuals to abstain from onions, sage, 

 parsnips, and even from Irish potatoes. Dr. Pereira mentions the case 

 of an English boy who had an incurable aversion to mutton : " He 

 could not eat mutton in any form. The peculiarity Avas supposed to 

 be owing to caprice, but the mutton was repeatedly disguised and 

 given to him unknown ; but iniiformly with the same result of pro- 

 ducing violent vomiting and diarrhoea. And from the severity of the 

 effects, which were in fact those of a virulent poison, there can be 

 little doubt that, if the use of mutton had been persisted in, it would 

 soon have destroyed the life of the individual." * 



It may be considered as a suggestive circumstance that the great 

 plui'ality of such instinctive aversions relate either to stimulants or to 

 some kind of animal food. To one person whose stomach can not 

 bear bread or apples, we shall find a thousand with an invincible re- 

 pugnance to pork, coffee, and pungent condiments. It is also certain 

 that, by voluntary abstinence from all such things, the vigor of the 

 alimentary organs can be considerably increased. The Danish sailors 

 whom the Dey of Algiers had fed on barley and dates for a couple of 

 months, found that after that they " could digest almost anything." f 



By adopting an absolutely non-stimulating, chiefly vegetable diet, 

 combined with active exercise in open air, the most dysj^eptic glutton 

 can cure himself in the course of a single season, and by the same 

 means every boarding-school might become a dietetic sanitarium. 

 The folloAving list of hygenic tnenus is arranged in the order of their 

 digestibility and wholesomeness : 



Milk, bread, and fruit. Eggs (raw or whipped), bread and honey. 

 Boiled eggs, bread, and apples (ancient Rome). Bread and butter, 

 rice-pudding, with sugar and fresh milk. Corn-bread or roasted chest- 

 nuts, butter, honey, and grapes (the usual diet of the long-lived Cor- 

 sican mountaineers). Fish, butter, oatmeal-porridge, and fresh milk 

 (Danish Islands). Pancakes, honey or new molasses, poached eggs, 



* Pereira, " Treatise on Food and Diet," p. 242. 

 f Wodderstadt, " On Yellow Fever," p. 72. 



