80 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Another thing to be said about fruit is, that fruit not only contains — 

 acid fruits — these antiseptics which are of value because they disinfect the 

 alimentary canal; but the fruits themselves encourage the development in the 

 intestines of germicidal substances, substances which are capable of killing 

 germs. 



I made some experiments some ten years ago which illustrate this very 

 forcibly. When we examine people at the sanitarium we sometimes find 

 the stomach fluid swarming with bacteria, sometimes as many as a million 

 germs in one drop of fluid from the stomach. Think of what it would be 

 in three pints of stomach contents! Well, now, I ha.ve taken stomach juice 

 and put it into different media; put some in beef tea, and the next day we 

 found it had so much poison in it when it was injected into a guinea pig 

 the guinea, pig was dead in half an hour, because poison was generated in 

 the presence of beef tea. Some of the same stomach juice was put into 

 apple juice, tomato juice, carrot juice, orange juice, lemon juice; it cannot 

 be made to grow in any kind of fruit juice. I tried it many, many times; 

 and these germs that grow in the stomach that produce such awful diseases 

 as cholera morbus, typhoid fever, and diarrhoea, none of these germs can 

 grow at all in fruit juices, but are actually killed. Don't you see the same 

 thing would happen if you take these fruit juices into the intestine, into 

 the stomach; they disinfect the stomach. 



But, as I said a moment ago, fruit does something more than that. The 

 sugars of the fruits encourage the growth in the intestine of friendly germs. 

 Did you ever hear of friendly germs? There are friendly germs. Some 

 time ago the rats got to making so much trouble in Italy that Pasteur was 

 appealed to to help them. He sent a man down to Italy, who found a rat 

 and infected that rat with a certain disease and turned him loose; and he 

 also infected other rats, and the thing spread until all the rats in the region 

 died, and so they were free from rats. 



So there are friendly germs. There are bugs that* are friendly. There 

 are bugs that kill other bugs. There are also friendly germs. Two classes 

 of germs in the body; the friendly and the unfriendly. Germs that make 

 poisons are, the unfriendly germs, germs that do not belong to us at all. 

 And then there are the friendly germs, that make acids similar to the acids 

 of fruits. When a baby is born into the world he has no germs about him; 

 but in ten or twelve hours after he is born his alimentary canal is swarming 

 with germs, friendly germs. I went to Paris last year to find what it meant. 

 I found a l3aby, his intestines just swarming with germs; a teaspoonful of 

 the discharge of that baby contained eight billion — too many to conceive 

 of, found in one dram of the dried fecal discharges. I went clear to Paris 

 to find out what that meant. It scared me. I said, "What in the world 

 is the matter with these babies?" The babies seemed to be all right, but 

 I was entirely at sea when I found a baby a week old, and perfectly healthy, 

 with all those germs. I found the thing had been studied over there in the 

 Pasteur Institute, and they found out the germs were friendly germs, had 

 been put there for the protection of the baby, like the clover in the field, 

 to keep the weeds from growing. You sow clover in your field; it keeps the 

 weeds out. That is exactly what nature does for the baby — sows flowers 

 in its flower garden. Mr. Dooley you know said he went to a doctor, and 

 the doctor thumped his chest and hit his stomach, and told him the weeds 

 were getting into his posy garden. And nature plants flowers in the baby's 

 alimentary canal, and these are germs which produce acids similar to the 

 acids of fruits. That is another hint you see in favor of fruits. By and by 



