Human Physiology. 



the wheat in flesh-forming nutriment, is reserved for cattle. 

 This bread is eaten, perhaps with a little grease (dripping), or 

 cheap-manufactured butter, made of horse fat, or bone fat, or 

 better dry, with a weak infusion of something called tea, some- 

 times coloured with a white liquid, which one may see retailed in 

 the streets of East London as milk at a penny a quart ! Refuse 

 potatoes, stale cabbages and turnips, and staler herrings, form 

 the usual diet of hundreds of thousands. Only the more 

 prosperous achieve the luxury of a bit of pork and some pota- 

 toes for a Sunday dinner. There is always the temptation to 

 buy what is cheap, and in animal food cheap generally means 

 nasty. Extravagant as may be the prices of West End trades- 

 men, the poor actually pay for rent, food, and clothing, more in 

 proportion to what they get than the rich. Their rents are 

 higher, their food, even to pennyworths of tea and sugar, pays a 

 larger profit. And the stuff they get, after being robbed in 

 price, weight, and measure, is not fitted to maintain them in 

 health is, on the contrary, a fertile source of disease and 

 premature mortality, producing low types of fevers, bowel 

 diseases, and scrofula. 



But in the middle or comfortable classes, and among the 

 rich, excess is a greater source of disease than famine among 

 the poor. An ounce too much of even good food needlessly 

 tasks the whole nutritive system, giving extra work to the 

 nerves, and muscles, and glands. Too much blood is nearly 

 as bad as too little. Over feeding has its dyspepsia, gout, 

 inflammations, fevers, constipation, piles, obesity, nightmares, 

 blues, and horrors. A hundred doctors and druggists are 

 employed by those who eat too much, where there is one of 

 either for those who eat too little, and while men are digging 

 their graves with their teeth, the butcher shovels guineas into 

 the doctor's pockets. Five meals a-day are three more than 

 health requires, and these three are in most cases causes of 

 disease in most cases, because five very simple and moderate 



