Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/392

 how vast the design, more or less of failure to rear the edifice results when the materials are ill chosen or wholly unworthy to be used. Many other sources of failure there may be which it is no part of my business to note; but the influence of food is not only itself cardinal in rank, but, by priority of action, gives rise to other and secondary agencies.

The slightest sketch of the commonest types of human life will suffice to illustrate this truth.

To commence, I fear it must be admitted that the majority of British infants are reared on imperfect milk by weak or ill-fed mothers. And thus it follows that the signs of disease, of feeble vitality, or of fretful disposition, may be observed at a very early age, and are apparent in symptonssymptoms [sic] of indigestion or in the cravings of want manifested by the "peevish" and sleepless infant. In circumstances where there is no want of abundant nutriment, over-feeding or complicated forms of food, suitable only for older persons, produce for this infant troubles which are no less grave than those of the former. In the next stage of life, among the poor the child takes his place at the parents' table, where lack of means, as well as of knowledge, deprives him of food more suitable than the rough fare of the adult, and moreover obtains for him, perchance, his little share of beer or gin. On the whole, perhaps he is not much worse off than the child of the well-to-do, who becomes a pet, and is already familiarized with complex and too solid forms of food and stimulating drinks which custom and self-indulgence have placed on the daily table. And soon afterward commence in consequence—and entirely in consequence, a fact it is impossible too much to emphasize—the "sick-headaches" and "bilious attacks," which pursue their victim through half a lifetime, to be exchanged for gout or worse at or before the grand climacteric. And so common are these evils that they are regarded by people in general as a necessary appanage of "poor humanity." No notion can be more erroneous, since it is absolutely true that the complaints referred to are self-engendered, form no necessary part of our physical nature, and for their existence are dependent almost entirely on our habits in relation to food and drink. I except, of course, those cases in which hereditary tendencies are so strong as to produce these evils, despite some care on the part of the unfortunate victim of an ancestor's self-indulgence. Equally, however, on the part of that little-to-be-revered progenitor was ill-chosen food, or more probably excess in quantity, the cause of disease, and not the physical nature of man.

The next stage of boyhood transfers the child just spoken of to a public school, where too often insufficient or inappropriate diet, at the most critical period of growth, has to be supplemented from other sources. It is almost unnecessary to say that chief among these are the pastrycook and the vender of portable provisions, for much of