THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 487 



would be utterly inexplicable without the analogies of the post hoc 

 ergo propter hoc fallacy our liability to mistake a coincidence for a 

 causal connection. In cold weather the hyperborean biped retreats to 

 his unventilated den and contracts a catarrh, which he ascribes, not 

 to its true cause, foul air, but to cold air, having noticed that winter 

 and pulmonary affections are annual concomitants. Fruits, like count- 

 less other products of nature, are most abundant when they are most 

 needed, and have for ages preserved the health of our tropical ances- 

 tors ; but their carnivorous descendant ascribes his affliction, not to 

 his daily beefsteaks, but to the occasional peaches and watermelons 

 of which he happened to partake about the time the fever took hold of 

 him. At the end of the year, when fruits become scarce, fevers too 

 disappear, and the proof seems complete. Inductive logic : but the 

 precipitate follower of Viscount Verulam fails to explain the fact that 

 in the swampiest and hottest districts of the Eastern Continent fevers 

 and fruits exclude each other like science and superstition, and the 

 still stranger fact that hundreds of Northlanders who scrupulously 

 abstain from fruit are nevertheless victimized whenever they brave 

 the sun of the lower latitudes. In cholera the fruit-delusion may have 

 derived a color of plausibility from the circumstance that persons 

 who have for months subsisted upon beef and farinaceous food are 

 liable to an attack of diarrhoea after their first experiments with a 

 more digestible diet. For analogous reasons a long incarceration 

 makes a prisoner unable to bear the fresh air and clear light of the 

 outer world. The Creoles use pepper enough with their meat to dis- 

 pense with other antiseptics, and yet eat fruit with every meal as the 

 French serve a dessert of cakes and raisins ''pour la bonne bouche." 

 A dime's worth per day for every man, woman, and child, of such 

 fruits as oranges, melons, or " Chickasaw plums," that can be bought in 

 almost every Southern town, would soon ruin the business of the qui- 

 nine-manufacturers and reduce the trade of the " bitters " distillers 

 to customers who like to drink whisky under some more respectable 

 name. 



The Spaniards divide all articles of diet into comidas frias and 

 comidas calientes ; but their definition of calorific food does not quite 

 coincide with Liebig's theory.* According to the nitrogenous and 

 non-nitrogenous system, starch, sugar, gums, are "respiratory" food, 

 and as exclusively heat-making as fat, while the experience-taught 

 South American would unhesitatingly class starchy potatoes and starchy 

 corn-bread with the comidas frias, the "cooling comestibles"; and 

 flesh, eggs, and rich cheese with the heat-producers. Cold milk would 

 be assigned to the former class, and, together with unleavened and 



* Professor Draper ("Human Physiology," p. 27) warns us that Liebig's classification 

 has been only " adopted for the sake of convenience," having no natural foundation. 

 Funke, in his " Lehrbuch der Physiologic," p. 186, accepts it with considerable reserva- 

 tions. Yerdeil, Tiobin, Mulder, and Moleschott, reject it as wholly untenable. 



