THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 489 



enterprise ; but, upon his return to his palatial residence at Bencoolen, 

 he and all his household were prostrated by the jungle-fever, and, at 

 the end of a life perhaps unequaled for successful activity, he found 

 himself bankrupt, childless, and hopeless. At a time when beef or 

 pork steaks and a bottle of porter were the essentials of a Chris- 

 tian breakfast, a vegetarian official of the East India Company might 

 have defied ill-luck to outweigh the advantage of pennanent good 

 health where good health obtained the highest premium. Even now, 

 by their obstinate adherence to their native diet, the British residents 

 of the East Indies are almost decimated every year, especially where 

 the zymotic tendency of that diet is aggravated by the effect of foul 

 air.* 



For on the other hand it is equally sure that strict attention to 

 ventilation and a liberal use of cold air and sponge-baths will palliate 

 the effects of many dietetic sins. The patient has either to adapt his 

 diet to the temperature of the South, or adapt his temperature to the 

 diet of the North. Experience has taught the Creoles to take tilings 

 coolly. With all their excitable temperament, they avoid violent out- 

 bursts of passion ; they do not overwork themselves ; they preserve 

 the even tenor of their way, even if they are behind time and know 

 that their dinner is getting cold. And, above all, they indulge in 

 liberal siestas. Hard work in the hot sun, with a stomach full of greasy 

 viands, obliges the vital force to resist the triple fire of a furnace 

 heated by the sun-rays, by exercise, and by calorific food. Brain-work, 

 too, is apt, in hot weather, to exert an undue strain on the vital ener- 

 gies, and to complicate the difficulties of the digestive apparatus. 

 Cold air is a peptic stimulant, but even in the North a man can not 

 labor with his brain without impeding the labors of his stomach ; but, 

 in the languid atmosphere of a southern marsh-land, that impediment 

 becomes an absolute prevention, and the brain-worker who eats for the 

 purpose of nourishing his organism had better save his food for sup- 

 per than oblige his stomach to carry it for half a day in an undi- 

 gested condition. For during that half day putrescent decomposition 

 anticipates the work of gastric disintegration ; the ingesta ferment, 

 catalytic humors pass into the circulation and prepare the way for 

 the reception and development of zymotic germs from without. The 

 hygienic alternative is, therefore, a long siesta, or a considerable post- 

 ponement of the dinner-hour. South of Cape Hatteras, Nature exacts 

 an account for every superfluous act that tends to raise the tempera- 

 ture of the system by a single degree. Keep cool becomes the first 

 commandment of her sanitary code. He who scrupulously avoids 

 anger, enthusiasm, and other calorific passions, who performs the prin- 



* " In the [East Indian] jails under British control there are usually confined no fewer 

 than 40,000 prisoners, and the average annual mortality of the whole was recently ten 

 per cent, rising in some cases to twenty-six per cent, or more than one in four " (Dr. 

 MacKinnon's " Treatise on the Public Health of Bengal," Cawnpore, 1848, chap. i). 



