H.—ANTHROPOLOGY. 203 
components ; without this they lack both vitality and resistance. ‘The 
foods required, eggs, butter, animal fats and fresh vegetables, are very 
expensive, but are not replaceable by the cheaper vegetable oils and lard. 
Many dietaries which appear satisfactory on a mere caloric basis prove 
failures owing to the lack of these vital elements. The industrial worker 
is doubly handicapped ; he not only loses his appetite and takes scarcely 
enough to provide the necessary energy for his work, but, too often, he 
takes even that in the form of margarines and canned foods which do not 
supply adequate vitamines. There is reason to think that the war-time 
rationing of foods and control of prices was to the benefit of the growing 
child of the elementary-school class in that it secured a more equable 
distribution of the essentials at a rate which was within the range of the 
family exchequer of a very large number. This helps to explain the un- 
doubted improvement of children’s health and physique during a period 
in which disaster might confidently have been anticipated. If, as is 
probable, physique suffered with the concentration of the population in 
the industrial areas, no small part may have been played by the confine- 
ment in a relaxing atmosphere and the substitution of inert for live foods. 
The worker who emigrates to more rural surroundings reverses these 
conditions and, if young enough, recovers part of his lost physique, and in 
any case his children, not being handicapped, fulfil their true potentialities. 
With feeding as with housing, though the industrial age brought its own 
defects, yet the contemporaneous increase of civilisation provided the 
remedy for some of the previous evils, such as those arising from imperfect 
methods of food preservation. 
Gilbert White wrote in 1778*8: ‘ Three or four centuries ago before 
there were any enclosures, sown grasses, field turnips or carrots, or hay, 
all the cattle which had grown fat in summer and which were not killed for 
winter use were turned out soon after Michaelmas to shift for themselves 
through the dead months, so that no fresh meat could be had in winter or 
spring.’ The curing at the best was very imperfect, and the diet of the 
poorer classes would be the semi-putrid sides of bacon, mutton or beef. 
Indeed, it was enacted that such should be given to the outcast by the 
Scottish Parliament at Scone in 1380.%° ‘Gif ony man brings to the 
market corrupt swine or salmond to be sauld, they sall be taken by the 
baillie and incontinent without any questions sall be sent to the lepper 
folke ; and gif there be no lepper folke, they sall be destroyed alluterlie.’ 
Such continual winter sufferings must have worked harm, seeing that it 
was not a matter of an occasional meal but a steady regimen. No wonder 
an Aberdeen physician wrote of the effects: ‘As we see dailie the pure 
man subject to sic calamitie nor the potent, quha are constrynitt be povertie 
to eitt evill and corrupte meittis, and diseis is contracit, heir of us callit 
pandemiall.’ 4° 
‘Toward the end of the eighteenth century the long-standing defects of 
food and housing were in full force, and their influence was accentuated 
by the coming of industrialism and the massing of people in towns. Thus 
disease from bad feeding and insanitary surroundings was the bane of 
88 Natural History of Selborne. Letter to Barrington, Jan. 1778. 
89 Acts of Robert III., Regiam Majestatem, p.414. Quoted by Creighton, /.c., p. 113. 
40 Gilbert Skene, Treatise on Plague, Bannatyne Club ed., p. 6. 
