238 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



duction from the surface of the body.* Of course, the adoption of 

 clothing does not prevent the whole of this radiation of heat. But i* 

 does affect most strongly the one strongest factor in the demand for 

 food. It relieves to a considerable extent an expenditure which has re- 

 quired for its maintenance at least three fifths of the whole food-con- 

 sumption of the body. This sudden and remarkable curtailment in the 

 alimentation of the individual can but produce a profound effect upon 

 the whole nutrient apparatus of the body. Or, if, escaping this danger, 

 the individual does not lessen his diet to correspond to the new scale 

 of requirements, he is exposed to the perils of overfeeding, because he 

 is taking an amount of food which has now become largely in excess 

 of his necessities. Moreover, the risks from quantity of food are en- 

 hanced by others from its quality. The new civilization brings new 

 kinds of food. Meat-eating is encouraged as being in accord with the 

 usages of temperate climes, without regard to what the requirements 

 of the tropical animal may be. With the new kinds of food comes 

 new cooking. Rational cooking is not a characteristic of early periods 

 of civilization, or of frontier methods ; and irrational cooking — always 

 harmful — is particularly so to those who have never been hardened to 

 it. And so it comes to pass that the frying-pan is added to the dan- 

 gerous weapons put by civilization into the savage's hand. 



Connected with these agencies, but more especially operative among 

 the more northern peoples, as for instance the American Indians, are 

 the influences of ill-ventilated and improperly heated dwellings. Ven- 

 tilation and domestic sanitation are among the most recent of sciences, 

 and even in the oldest centers of civilization are only just beginning 

 to be given the consideration due to their importance. What wonder, 

 then, that the Indian, accustomed to the airiness of a loosely built 

 wigwam or a hut of boughs, should find, in the closely joined cabin 

 that the white man teaches him to build, a source of foul and poisoned 

 air to which his previous wild life makes him especially sensitive ? 

 Between the Scylla of carbonic-acid gas and animal effluvia and the 

 Charybdis of cold draughts the savage steers a troublous course in 

 the early years of his living under his " own roof." And, if, perchance, 

 the trader has sold him an " air-tight stove " as a substitute for his 

 former camp-fire, his perils truly thicken. 



Finally, we must not omit to mention the moral and psychical in- 

 fluences which, though not tangible, are nevertheless powerful, and 

 whose effect in the very awakening of a people is not altogether fa- 

 vorable to a calm and healthy life. There is a sudden disturbance of 

 the mental equipoise by the introduction of new wants and new aims. A 

 savage once brought directly into the current of the activities of civil- 

 ization can never be again just what he was. An undefined but pow- 

 erful desire and unrest have taken possession of him. When once the 

 note of progress has sounded in a people's ears, its echoes do not easily 



* Vide Foster's " Physiology," p. 323, et seq. 



