Chap. I. SALT A CUBE FOB INDIGESTION. 27 



had frequent opportunities of seeing at other times, for, the dis- 

 trict being destitute of salt, the rich alone could afford to buy it. 

 The native doctors, aware of the cause of the malady, usually 

 prescribed some of that ingredient with their medicines. The 

 doctors themselves had none, so the poor resorted to us for aid. 

 We took the hint, and henceforth cured the disease by giving a 

 teaspoonful of salt, minus the other remedies. Either milk or 

 meat had the same effect, though not so rapidly as salt. Long 

 afterwards, when I was myself deprived of salt for four months, 

 at two distinct periods, I felt no desire for that condiment, but I 

 was plagued by very great longing for the above articles of food. 

 This continued as long as I was confined to an exclusively ve- 

 getable diet, and when I procured a meal of flesh, though boiled 

 in perfectly fresh rain-water, it tasted as pleasantly saltish as if 

 slightly impregnated with the condiment. Milk or meat, obtained 

 in however small quantities, removed entirely the excessive 

 longing and dreaming about roasted ribs of fat oxen, and 

 bowls of cool thick milk eTirffling forth from the big-bellied 

 calabashes; and I could then understand the thankfulness to 

 Mrs. L. often expressed by poor Bakwain women, hi the in- 

 teresting condition, for a very little of either. 



In addition to other adverse influences, the general uncer- 

 tainty, though not absolute want, of food, and the necessity of 

 frequent absence for the purpose of either hunting game or 

 collecting roots and fruits, proved a serious barrier to the 

 progress of the people in knowledge. Our own education in 

 England is carried on at the comfortable breakfast and dinner 

 table and by the cosy fire, as well as in the church and 

 school. Eew English people with stomachs painfully empty 

 would be decorous at church any more than they are when 

 these organs are overcharged. Ragged schools would have 

 been a failure had not the teachers wisely provided food for 

 the body as well as food for the mind ; and not only must 

 we show a friendly interest in the bodily comfort of the objects 

 of our sympathy as a Clnistian duty, but we can no more 

 hope for healthy feelings among the poor, either at home or 

 abroad, without feeding them into them, than we can hope to 

 see an ordinary working-bee reared into a queen-mother by 

 the ordinary food of the hive. 



