Chap. I. 
SALT A CUEE FOE 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 
teaspoonftd 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. 
Tins 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 tliick milk gurgling forth from the big-bellied 
calabashes; and I could then understand the thankfulness to 
Mrs. L. often expressed by poor Bakwain women, in 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. Bagged 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 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. 
