SAI/T FOR INDIGESTION. 1 9 



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 

 vegetable 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, re- 

 moved entirely the excessive longing and dreaming about 

 roasted ribs of fat oxen, and bowls of cool thick milk 

 gurgling forth from the big-bellied calabashes ; and I could 

 then understand the thankfulness to Mrs. Iy. often ex- 

 pressed by poor Bakwain women, in the interesting con- 

 dition, for a very little of either. 



In addition to other adverse influences, the general 

 uncertainty, 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 com- 

 fortable breakfast and dinner table and by the cosy fire, 

 as well as in the church and school. Few English people 

 with stomachs painfully empty would be decorous at 

 church any more than they are when these organs are over- 

 charged. 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 sym- 

 pathy as a Christian 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. 



Sending the Gospel to the heathen must, if this view be 

 correct, include much more than is implied in the usual 

 picture of a missionary, namely, a man going about with a 

 Bible under his arm. The promotion of commerce ought 

 to be specially attended to, as this, more speedily than 

 anything else, demolishes that sense of isolation which 

 heathemsm engenders, and makes the tribes feel them- 



