Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/144

138 in any essential respect. Rivers run most easily in their ancient channels. Remedy-mongers have tried the effect of concentrated food—pure fat, sugar, albumen, and so forth, but it was found that the human stomach preferred more concrete substances. "Whole-wheat bread," with all its innutritive admixtures, is more digestible than pure starch.

Chemically the reason why is not quite clear, but we may suspect that it has a good deal to do with habits formed during the long ages preceding the advent of Liebig's food extracts.

And Nature declines to ratify the contract of kid-gloved brain-workers with the inventors of labor-saving machinery. Intellectual development, to be sure, is the quintescence of all that distinguishes man from his brute fellow-creatures; but beings of our species cannot thrive on metaphysics alone, any more than on Dr. Bernard's Elixir of Life. To avoid dyspepsia, insomnia, hemorrhoids, and sick headaches the Trismegistus of Science has now and then to descend from his study and exercise his motive muscles in the playgrounds of the hirsute anthropoids.

Dr. Boerhave's remark that we ought to