PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 467 



throwing physic to the dogs the demands of your stomach will often 

 become exorbitant, but only apparently so ; your system wants to re- 

 pair the waste of the disease. Never fear that " the digestive organs 

 are too feeble yet," etc. ; those organs will keep their promise, unless you 

 break yours by resuming medication. Have you eaten more than the 

 wants of your system require ? Your appetite will not respond to your 

 invitation at the next meal. Take the hint wait. Do not increase 

 the troubles of your stomach by mordant spices and alcohol. In the 

 sultry dog-days your system craves a surcease of greasy ragoiits and 

 yearns for something refreshing sherbet or cool fruit. Get a water- 

 melon. " But isn't the yellow fever in town ? Quack, Quinine, and 

 other leading physicians, agree that one must take a course of antisep- 

 tics, and avoid vegetables at such seasons." Don't believe them ; 

 Nature knows better. Fruit is a better antiseptic than fusel poison 

 and wormwood. The frugivorous Mexican survives where the beef- 

 eating stranger dies in spite of his bitters. If sailors have been sur- 

 feited with salt meat, their craving after lemon-juice or fresh fruit 

 becomes more urgent from day to day ; the surcharge of their organism 

 with saline matter requires a neutralizing acid. A single meal of salt 

 herring excites merely thirst ; common water is yet sufficient to dilute 

 the ingesta and eliminate the salt. Vegetable substances that consist 

 chiefly of starch and water supply the wants of our organism less com- 

 pletely than those that contain an admixture of gluten, albumen, and 

 fat ; and, if we restrict our diet to the first-named class of aliments, our 

 system announces the deficit by means of our senses ; without such 

 complements as milk, sugar, or fat, rice-bread is more insipid than 

 bread from unbolted wheat-flour. 



All dietetic needs of our body thus announce themselves in a vei'sa- 

 tile language of their own, and he who has learned to interpi'et that 

 language, nor willfully disregards its just appeals, may avoid all di- 

 gestive disorders not by fasting if he is hungry or forcing food upon 

 his protesting stomach, not by convulsing his bowels with nauseous 

 drugs, but by quietly following the guidance of his instincts. 



Nature's health laws are simple. The road to health and happiness 

 is not the labyrinthine maze described by our medical mystagogues. 

 In perusing their dietetic codes one is fairly bewildered by a mass of 

 incongruous precepts and prescriptions, laborious compromises between 

 old and new theories, arbitrary rules, and illogical exceptions, anti- 

 natural restrictions and anti-natural remedies. Their views of the 

 constitution of man suggest the King of Aragon's remark about the 

 cycles and epicycles of the Ptolemaic system : " It strikes me the 

 Creator might have arranged this business in a simpler way." 



All normal things are good, all evil is abnormal, is an axiom which 

 has been almost reversed in the principle of our orthodox health theo- 

 ries, for many of our physical educators still hold to the cardinal error 

 of their spiritual colleagues, who consider depravity and wretchedness 



