REVIEWS. 
83 
ledge necessary for the safe conduct of his business, and expended his money to obtain 
the required qualification, is to only have the distinguished privilege of selling a few 
heroic poisons, the profit of which will scarcely buy him salt to his porridge,—T be¬ 
lieve all sensible men will agree with me, that we had better be without the privilege 
and the Act also. To suppose that a chemist’s business consists mainly in selling 
poisons, shows the profound ignorance of the public on the subject. And so long as 
this idea prevails in the Parliamentary mind, it will be folly to ask it to legislate for us. 
A Yobksiiibeman. 
REVIEWS. 
Ox Food, as a Means of Prevention of Disease. By Erasmus Wilson, F.R.S. 
London : John Churchill and Sons. 
This is the substance of an address delivered at a meeting of the Medical Officers of 
Health of London, and its gist is simply this :—“ Proper food, properly used, produces a 
sound set of organs, while improper food produces an unsound and a weak organ, and 
one prone to fall into a state of disease. Now, the chief organs of the body are the 
brain, the lungs, the heart; therefore our proposition may be varied thus : While proper 
food produces a sound brain, sound lungs, and a sound heart, improper food produces an 
unsound brain, unsound lungs, and unsound heart; or, to substitute function for organ, 
improper food produces insanity, imbecility, consumption, and in the case of the heart, 
sudden death.” 
Mr. W r ilson then proceeds to refer to milk as the food of the infant man, and shows 
the importance which attaches to its being given in perfect purity, in sufficient quan¬ 
tity, and with regularity, and proceeds as follows:—• 
“But a period comes when milk is no longer the diet of children,-and when custom, 
originating, as we have seen, in nature’s promptings, has determined the necessity of 
three meals in the day. The infant demands more than three meals, and makes no dis¬ 
tinction between the day and the night. The day of the infant is a day of twenty-four 
hours ; the day of childhood, as of the remainder of life, has a duration of twelve to six¬ 
teen hours. The three meals at present under consideration are the morning meal, the 
midday meal, the evening meal. These meals represent the wants of the body arising 
during the intervening interval. The morning meal is intended to supply the moderate 
waste of the night, the midday meal the active waste of the morning, the evening meal 
the active waste of the afternoon. The amount of the three periods of waste is pretty 
equal; the amount of the supply should be equivalent to that of the waste. 
“I am desirous of impressing upon my hearers my opinion and firm conviction that 
food is not only a necessity, but in civilized life a threefold necessity, and that the three 
meals should each represent the third of the nourishment of the day, and be so appor¬ 
tioned as to comprehend an equal amount of variety and an equal amount of nourish¬ 
ment. In the primitive life of the labouring class this law is fully appreciated, and is 
acted upon to the full extent of their means. With the exception of a somewhat more 
bulky midday meal, the morning meal and the evening meal do not far diverge from the 
standard of the midday repast. 
“ But the educated classes are apt to fancy that they possess a knowledge superior to 
that of nature, and the result is a perversion of the law of nourishment that leads to the 
development of debility and disease. A careful, well-meaning mother, from purest igno¬ 
rance—another expression for superior knowledge, the ‘little’ knowledge that is so pro¬ 
verbially dangerous—will tell you that she conforms to the law of nature in providing 
for her children three meals in the day. She will describe those meals as breakfast, 
dinner, and tea, and you will find the composition of those meals to be as follow-s:—A 
vegetable breakfast, namely, bread and butter, with tea and a little milk ; a dinner half 
animal and half vegetable; and a ‘tea,’ vegetable like the breakfast. Here, then, we 
find education bringing about a total change in the diet of man. Born an animal- 
feeder, he is quickly transformed into a vegetable-feeder ; that is, more than two-thirds 
of his diet is vegetable and the remaining third only animal, the exact opposite of that 
which I consider should be the standard diet of children; namely, one-third vegetable 
and two-thirds animal. 
