Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/698

682 Jams made from nice fresh fruit, and put up in glass or ware, make a very good article of diet, but much of the jams of commerce should be used as food for pigs. Jams act on tin and lead very much like tart fruits, but the acid in them is greatly neutralized by the sugar. Still, I have seen the outside of the jam in a tin quite discolored.

Solomon said, "Stay me with raisins, comfort me with apples," so great and wise kings six thousand years ago wished to be fed with dried fruit and apples. In this highly enlightened age it is nothing to our credit that we pay less attention to our diet than these old patriarchs did. They thought more of their vineyards than they did of their cattle. When Moses sent the spies into Canaan they were told to bring back samples of the fruit it bore, and they brought back not a fat bullock but a very fat bunch of grapes. A medical writer has recently been maintaining that bread and other starchy food, containing as they do large quantities of lime, are responsible, especially in aged people, for many of the diseases from which we suffer, such as apoplexy, rheumatic gout, etc., and urged that fruit should be taken freely instead, to counteract these limy effects. One of the first symptoms, when people are deprived of fruit and vegetables, is very severe pain in the joints like rheumatism, and death from failure of the heart's action. Whether he is right about this lime may not be proved, but there is no doubt but lime exists too largely in the blood vessels in these diseases, and if fruit were eaten regularly it would do much to prevent it. Science to-day tells us that we may live under the most beautiful conditions, we may feast on bread, meat, eggs, rice, cocoa, oatmeal, and such like foods for a short time, but unless we take fruits or fresh vegetables—fruits being the best—we shall get listless, with leaden face, etc., until we die in a few months at the longest; and it follows that if we would keep ourselves and our children with clear skins, bright intellects, good digestion, rich colored, healthy blood and strength for work, we must regularly take fruit and vegetables, and look upon them as actually more necessary for the support of good health than any other article of diet.

among the Mongols of the borders of Tibet. Mr. W. W. Rockhill heard a story, said to be widespread among the people, that some five hundred years ago a foreign emperor, desirous of knowing what was in the sun, took fifty Mongol men and as many women, and, shutting them up in a crystal casket that had the power of flying, started them on a voyage of discovery to that star. Nothing has been heard of the explorers since then, and the Mongols bear a grudge against the emperor, whoever he may have been, who served their people so ill.