Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/211

That assistance has made the fortune of numerous nostrum-mongers and helped our made-dishes to wreck the health of many millions. For, without the interference of a positive poison, dietetic abuses have to be carried to a monstrous excess before they will result in chronic constipation. A slight stringency of the bowels is often simply a transient lassitude of the system, and may be safely left to the remedial resources of Nature. After the third day, however, the disorder demands a change of regimen. A chief objection to our system of cookery is the hygienic tendency of the essence-mania, the concentration of nutritive elements. Ours is an age of extracts. We have moral extracts in the form of Bible-House pamphlets; language-extracts in the form of compendious grammars; exercise-extracts under the name of gymnastic curriculums; air-extracts in the shape of oxygen-bladders, and a vast deal of such food-concentrations as Liebig's soup, fruit-jellies, condensed milk, flavoring extracts, and branless flour. But, somehow or other, the old plan seems, after all, the best. In the homes of our forefathers morals were taught by example, and with very respectable results. Six years of grammar-drill in a dead language do not further a student as much as six months of conversation in a living tongue—the concrete beats the abstract. Boat-racing, wood-chopping, and mountain-climbing, are healthier, as well as more pleasant, than gymnastic crank-work; the diverting incidents of out-door sports which the movement-cure doctor tries to eliminate are the very things that give interest and life to exercise. And, for some reasons (not easy to define without the help of such analogies), concentrated nourishment does not agree with the nature of the human organism. The lungs find it easier to derive their oxygen from woodland air than from a ready-made extract, and the stomach, on the whole, prefers to get its nourishment in the form for which its organism was originally adapted. Want of bulk makes our food so indigestible. In fruits and berries—probably the staple diet of our instinct-taught ancestors—the percentage of nutritive elements is rather small, but the residue should not be called worthless, since it serves to make the whole more digestible. A large, ripe watermelon contains about three ounces of saccharine elements, which in that combination have a mildly aperient effect, while in the form of glucose-candy they would produce constipation, heartburn, and flatulence. The coarsest bran-bread is the most digestible, and to the palate of an unprejudiced child also far more attractive than the smooth but chalky and insipid starch preparations called baker's bread. Graham-bread and milk, whortleberries, rice-pudding, and stewed prunes, once or twice a week, generally keep the bowels in tolerable order, provided that the general mode of life does not prevent the influence of the natural peptic stimulants. But even in a case of obstinate costiveness few people would resort to drugs after trying the effects of a legumen-diet. Beans do not agree with some persons (though the Pythagorean interdict has no hygienic significance), but