OF DIGESTION. 171 



per attention to diet. The food introduced must be as easily 

 digestible as possible. It is not easy to lay down any rule for this, 

 although the account given above of the digestibility of different 

 substances will furnish some data ; but the stomachs of those trou- 

 bled with indigestion are most capricious, and we sometimes see 

 them reject anything simple, and evince what we would consider 

 the most extraordinary predilections. Mild laxatives, tonics, bit- 

 ters, &c., all may take their turns as assistant remedies. Pustules 

 brought out on the stomach by our irritating plaster are often most 

 beneficial. 



One habit, and a very important one too, and which is much 

 neglected, and often induces this and other complaints of the diges- 

 tive organs, is a neglect of proper mastication or chewing our food 

 sufficiently. Tyrone Power, in his Travels in America, speaking of 

 the hasty manner in which the Americans eat, thus remarks : 

 " They dart their food with the rapidity of a wolf f" Fowler, in 

 his work on Physiology, thus remarks on this subject : 



HOW TO EAT ; OR MASTICATION. 



" Our food once selected, the next question is, how shall it be 

 eaten 7 With teeth, of course, never with the stomach. Nature 

 forbids our throwing it into its receptacle as with a shovel. By ren- 

 dering its only passage way small, she literally compels us to de- 

 posit it in small parcels. She has also furnished us with a mouth, 

 set all around with two rows of teeth, which fit exactly upon each 

 other, and are every way adapted to crushing our food to atoms. 

 Nor can we swallow our food without its being more or less chewed. 



To persuade as well as to compel such mastication, nature has 

 rendered it highly pleasurable. Instead of food being tasteless, she 

 has given it a far more delicious flavor than all the spices of India 

 could impart. Yet man does not know how to enjoy a tithe of the 

 gustatory pleasure she has appended to eating. Not one in thou- 

 sands know how to eat ! Not that all do not know how to eat 

 enough, yet few know how to eat little enough. All know hew to 

 eat fast enough, but very few know how to eat slowly enough. 

 And strange as it may seem, few know how even to chew, simple, 

 easy, and natural as this process is ! Nine hundred and ninety- 

 nine in every thousand eat mostly with their stomachs, instead of 

 with their teeth ! One would think that this poor slave had to per- 

 form two or three times its wonted task, simply to digest the 

 enormous quantities of heterogeneous compounds forced upon it, 



