THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 199 



That assistance has made the fortune of numerous nostrum-mon- 

 gers and helped our made-dishes to wreck the health of many millions. 

 For, without the interference of a positive poison, dietetic abuses have 

 to be carried to a monstrous excess before they will result in chronic 

 constipation. A slight stringency of the bowels is often simply a tran- 

 sient lassitude of the system, and may be safely left to the remedial re- 

 sources of Nature. After the third day, however, the disorder demands 

 a change of regimen. A chief objection to our system of cookery is 

 the hygienic tendency of the essence-mania, the concentration of nutri- 

 tive elements. Ours is an age of extracts. We have moral extracts 

 in the form of Bible-House pamphlets ; language-extracts in the form 

 of compendious grammars ; exercise-extracts under the name of gym- 

 nastic curriculums ; air-extracts in the shape of oxygen-bladders, and 

 a vast deal of such food-concentrations as Liebig's soup, fruit- jellies, 

 condensed milk, flavoring extracts, and branless flour. But, somehow 

 or other, the old plan seems, after all, the best. In the homes of our 

 forefathers morals were taught by example, and with very respectable 

 results. Six years of grammar-drill in a dead language do not further 

 a student as much as six months of conversation in a living tongue — 

 the concrete beats the abstract. Boat-racing, wood-chopping, and 

 mountain-climbing, are healthier, as well as more pleasant, than gym- 

 nastic crank-work ; the diverting incidents of out-door sports which 

 the movement-cure doctor tries to eliminate are the very things that 

 give interest and life to exercise. And, for some reasons (not easy to 

 define without the help of such analogies), concentrated nourishment 

 does not agree with the nature of the human organism. The lungs 

 find it easier to derive their oxygen from woodland air than from a 

 ready-made extract, and the stomach, on the whole, prefers to get its 

 nourishment in the form for which its organism was originally adapted. 

 Want of bulk makes our food so indigestible. In fruits and berries — 

 probably the staple diet of our instinct-taught ancestors — the percent- 

 age of nutritive elements is rather small, but the residue should not be 

 called worthless, since it serves to make the whole more digestible. A 

 large, ripe watermelon contains about three ounces of saccharine ele- 

 ments, which in that combination have a mildly aperient effect, while 

 in the form of glucose-candy they would produce constipation, heart- 

 burn, and flatulence. The coarsest bran-bread is the most digestible, 

 and to the palate of an unprejudiced child also far more attractive than 

 the smooth but chalky and insipid starch preparations called baker's 

 bread. Graham-bread and milk, whortleberries, rice-pudding, and 

 stewed prunes, once or twice a week, generally keep the bowels in tol- 

 erable order, provided that the general mode of life does not prevent 

 the influence of the natural peptic stimulants. But even in a case of 

 obstinate costiveness few people would resort to drugs after trying 

 the effects of a legumen-diet. Beans do not agree with some persons 

 (though the Pythagorean interdict has no hygienic significance), but 



