Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/407

Rh a certain degree of leisure and immunity from the distressing anxieties which vex and worry the lives of men actively engaged in business. The danger of sickness from exposure, as far as the liability to exposure is concerned, and the danger arising from accidents are lessened; old people are careful, and warily thrust themselves into danger. Calmness, quietness, and a regular habit of life, succeed to confusion, activity, and an indulgent and irregular method of living. Life wanes, the descent is easy and gradual, a peg is lost here and a prop there, the sympathies become blunted, the intellect chilled, the senses lose their acuteness, and "the play is played out." What more delightful spectacle than an aged person in full possession of all his faculties, enjoying life with the zest of manhood's prime, appreciative of the pleasures of the table, the society of friends, the charm of music, and the intellectual feast that a good book presents to him!

Hufeland, in his "Art of prolonging Life," advises old people to eat sparingly. There is a great difference between a "gourmet" or "gourmand" and a glutton. The pleasures of eating dependent upon the sense of taste, when eye-sight and hearing are daily becoming more and more impaired, the possession of leisure in which to cultivate their gastronomic talents, as well as the quiet necessary for the performance of the digestive act, combined with the necessity for careful nourishment, prohibit old people from yielding to any mistaken notion that, because they are old, food is of little consequence to them, and that the ordinary rules governing assimilation and nutrition do not hold in their case.

A great deal of the immunity of old people from sickness will depend upon their power of digestion and assimilation.

Food and drink should be partaken of sparingly, and at proper intervals: an overloaded stomach, or a stomach filled with badly cooked food, or food taken at an improper time, will occasion much distress to an old person. At the same time, it may lay the foundation for disease which will cut short a hitherto robust old age.

If actual pain and danger do not follow this gorging, it will probably entail loss of sleep, and consequent exhaustion, all of which we seek to shield the old from, as we do the child.

In the normal act of digestion, the consciousness of that act is wanting. Most persons engaged in active life fail to give the proper amount of time to eating and digestion; for this natural and physiological action to be performed with the ease and perfection of detail which Nature, in her arrangement of the means for such an end, intended, deliberation must accompany the eating, and rest of mind and body the digestion of food. Haste when eating, and activity, bodily or mental, during the digestive process, are fatal to the object for which food is taken. It is only in old age (I refer particularly to America), now, that that leisure which is indispensable to the proper performance of digestion is obtained, and yet, when, after years of toil, we