Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/250

238 from the surface of the body. Of course, the adoption of clothing does not prevent the whole of this radiation of heat. But it does affect most strongly the one strongest factor in the demand for food. It relieves to a considerable extent an expenditure which has required for its maintenance at least three fifths of the whole food-consumption of the body. This sudden and remarkable curtailment in the alimentation of the individual can but produce a profound effect upon the whole nutrient apparatus of the body. Or, if, escaping this danger, the individual does not lessen his diet to correspond to the new scale of requirements, he is exposed to the perils of overfeeding, because he is taking an amount of food which has now become largely in excess of his necessities. Moreover, the risks from quantity of food are enhanced by others from its quality. The new civilization brings new kinds of food. Meat-eating is encouraged as being in accord with the usages of temperate climes, without regard to what the requirements of the tropical animal may be. With the new kinds of food comes new cooking. Rational cooking is not a characteristic of early periods of civilization, or of frontier methods; and irrational cooking—always harmful—is particularly so to those who have never been hardened to it. And so it comes to pass that the frying-pan is added to the dangerous weapons put by civilization into the savage's hand.

Connected with these agencies, but more especially operative among the more northern peoples, as for instance the American Indians, are the influences of ill-ventilated and improperly heated dwellings. Ventilation and domestic sanitation are among the most recent of sciences, and even in the oldest centers of civilization are only just beginning to be given the consideration due to their importance. what wonder, then, that the Indian, accustomed to the airiness of a loosely built wigwam or a hut of boughs, should find, in the closely joined cabin that the white man teaches him to build, a source of foul and poisoned air to which his previous wild life makes him especially sensitive? Between the Scylla of carbonic-acid gas and animal effluvia and the Charybdis of cold draughts the savage steers a troublous course in the early years of his living under his "own roof." And, if, perchance, the trader has sold him an "air-tight stove" as a substitute for his former camp-fire, his perils truly thicken.

Finally, we must not omit to mention the moral and psychical influences which, though not tangible, are nevertheless powerful, and whose effect in the very awakening of a people is not altogether favorable to a calm and healthy life. There is a sudden disturbance of the mental equipoise by the introduction of new wants and new aims. A savage once brought directly into the current of the activities of civilization can never be again just what he was. An undefined but powerful desire and unrest have taken possession of him. When once the note of progress has sounded in a people's ears, its echoes do not easily