60 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



once in a while to a smoker's den, to sniff the " pestilent and penal 

 fires," and let him glory in his blest exemption. 



Coffee and tea temptations, pungent spices, etc., may be fore- 

 stalled in the same way ; much is gained if the dietetic innocence 

 of a child has been preserved to the end of the fourteenth year, 

 the age when routine habits first become physiologically confirmed. 

 The habits of the last years of growth become ingrained, as it were, 

 with the constitution of the body, and will bias the physical inclina- 

 tions of all after-years ; circumstances may oblige a man to conform 

 to the customs of a foreign country, the rules of a regimental mess, 

 etc., but, upon the first opportunity of regulating his own regimen, 

 the habits of his boyhood will reassert themselves, even in regard to 

 the time and number of his daily meals. I know from personal expe- 

 rience the unspeakable advantage of having a constitutional predilec- 

 tion for postponing the principal meal till the day's work is done. It 

 was the plan of the ancient Greeks, and to their followers every day 

 is its own reward the symposium, and the long, undisturbed siesta a 

 daily festival. It almost doubles a man's working capacity, by saving 

 him the dire daily struggle between duty and the after-dinner drowsi- 

 ness. Children who have tried the two methods will rarely hesitate in 

 their choice. Give them a lunch at twelve o'clock, and for breakfast a 

 crust of sweet bran-bread, the coarser the better. A hard crust is the 

 best possible dentifrice. I never could get myself to believe in the nat- 

 ural necessity of a tooth-brush. The African nations, the Hindoos, the 

 natives of Southern Europe, the South-Sea Islanders, the Arabs, the 

 South American vegetarians, in short, three fourths of our fellow-men, 

 besides our next relatives, the frugivorous animals, have splendid teeth 

 without sozodont. I really believe that ours decay from sheer disuse ; 

 the boarding-house homo lives chiefly on pap wants all his meats soft- 

 boiled, and growls at cold biscuit or an underdone potato ; in other 

 words, he delegates to the cook the proper functions of his teeth. We 

 hear occasionally of old men getting a second, or rather third, set of 

 teeth. I met one of them in northern Guatemala, and ascertained 

 that he had become toothless daring a twelve years' sojourn in a sea- 

 port town, and that he got his new set upon his return to his native 

 village, where circumstances obliged him to resume the hard corn-cake 

 diet of his boyhood years. His teeth had reappeared, as soon as their 

 services were called for, and would probably never have absented 

 themselves if a pap-diet had not made them superfluous. An artificial 

 dentifrice will certainly keep the teeth white, but that does not pre- 

 vent their premature decay ; disuse gradually softens their substance, 

 till one fine day the hash-eater snaps his best incisor upon an unexpected 

 piece of bone. Every old dentist knows hundreds of city customers 

 whom the daily use of a tooth-brush did not save from the necessity 

 of applying, before the end of the fortieth year, for a complete " cel- 

 luloid set." I do not say that a soft tooth-brush and such dentifrices 



