Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/162

150 but in the mean time we might restrict our calorific efforts to the eight coolest months of the year.

In the first place we might curtail the number of our warm meals, or cook them on the coöperative plan in a separate building, where ten or twelve families could use a common stove and a joint stock of fuel and certain groceries, and thus save our sitting-rooms and studies from the effects which even a basement-kitchen fire exerts on the domestic atmosphere. Heat-producing food, too, might very well be dispensed with. The vegetarian school has demonstrated beyond the possibility of a doubt that farinaceous dishes, sweet milk, and fruit are sufficient to maintain a hard-working man in perfect health, and such a diet might certainly be substituted for our greasy steaks and ragouts during the hottest weeks of the sultry season. Whether or not such mild stimulants as tea and coffee are preferable to pure water, it is certain that they are sudorific drinks, and that even their moderate use increases the temperature of our blood by several degrees during their passage through the digestive apparatus. Smoking-hot dishes and such spices as pepper, mustard, onions, and ginger, are liable to the same objection and we should not forget that sultry weather retards the digestion of all fatty substances by several hours.

Cooling and non-stimulating drinks of a temperature of not less than 5° above the freezing-point might, on the contrary, be freely used in any enjoyable quantity, for the prevailing notions in regard to the danger of "cold drinks in the heat" prove nothing but the marvelous tenacity of popular superstitions. Like the prejudice against raw fruit, night air, and "draught" (i. e., the passage of a current of pure air through the vitiated air of a human dwelling), this notion has furnished a pretext for the strangest sanitary aberrations, and has been defended with the same ingenious sophistry that supplies the advertisers of patent nostrums with their specious arguments. To prevent cold water from "chilling our stomachs," we are advised to mix it with a few drops of brandy, to wash our wrists and let our faces cool off or to chew a preliminary bread-crust; and parents solemnly warn their children not to endanger their health by gratifying an imprudent appetite.

But the craving of our heated system for a refrigerating beverage is a natural instinct which we share with all warm-blooded animals and which manifests itself in children and savages as well as in adult and civilized men. We see horses, hounds, and stags, walk bodily into a cool river after a hot chase, or quench their thirst at a cold spring with perfect impunity, and the idea that Nature should thus tempt us to anything positively injurious implies a deplorable ignorance of the language of our physical conscience. Injurious things, as poisons, excessive heat, or excessive cold, are disagreeable; and whatever is agreeable is beneficial, unless instinct has been supplanted by artificial habits. It might, for instance, be said that the appetite of a drunkard tempts