Imatges de pàgina
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WHY EACH SHOULD HAVE A SEPARATE BED.

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or more, which amount has passed off in perspiration, sensible or insensible, and been distributed through the bedclothing and the room. Therefore I repeat, ventilate and sun your sleeping

rooms.

Each individual, even to the child, should have his or her own sleeping room. Among the highly cultured classes in France and Germany even husbands and wives sleep separately, and the baby, while quite young, has its crib between the parents' beds; but very early the child is put into a room and bed by itself. It is wisdom so to do. The piling of two or three into the same bed, pig-like, is unnatural and unhealthy.

If the young sleep in the same room with the aged it should be for medicinal or life-giving purposes only. In youth, what the world vaguely calls the "animal spirits," really vital nerve force, is abundant. This vital force is a fine, sublimated substance, and when influenced by love and projected by the will it flows from the strong to the feeble; from the young to the aged. The four sensitive centers of the organization are the brain, the solar plexus, the generative department, and hollows of the feet.

There is an aural emanation surrounding every man, woman, and infant. The psychic senses it, the clairvoyant sees it.

The child that sleeps with the grandmother grows pale and feeble; but she gains to the extent that the little one loses. The young wife soon gets to look as withered as the wrinkled old man she marries. There are few more painful sights than to see an old man who ought to be thinking of death and eternity readjust his glasses, dye his hair, color his beard, gormandize on oysters, and then go off and marry a young girl. She marries for a home; but all such homes too often prove to be earthly hells!

CHAPTER XV.

"A SIMPLE Vegetarian diet, if persevered in, induces a religious and devout spirit, habits of sobriety, economy, self-control, meek simplicity, and purity. To me, therefore, vegetarianism is a moral blessing of great value, and I trust I may never depart from it. How glad am I to hear it has found in you a zealous advocate and established a society, however small, in the midst of a country which is teaching our people to drink spirits and eat beef."-Babu Keeshub Chunder Sen, India.

Wheat, old as the civilized races, is the best of all the cereals. It was the common food of the ancient Egyptians. The wheat harvest is spoken of in the patriarchal age. Joseph dreamed of the sheaves of wheat. The primitive Greeks took with them on their war marches knapsacks filled with dry wheat; and in Cæsar's time Roman philosophers wrote and poets sung the praises of wheat. So far as any one kind of food is concerned, wheat is the best, and may be put down as the prince of cereals.

The great men of history whose living, burning words startled the world were not born in the warm banana-lands of the south, but in the cooler wheat zone, or the great wheat belt, lying between 35 and 55 degrees north latitude.

Man can live upon wheat or wheat and milk alone; but he could not live any great length of time upon bread made of superfine flour. To sustain life the whole kernel must be utilized. Chemically considered, wheat is composed of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, magnesia, sulphur, lime, potash, silica, soda, chlorine,-in brief, all, or nearly all, of the ingredients and elements requisite for the support of human life, and yet I am of the opinion that the human system demands variety of food.

Milk is a most excellent article of diet. Indian meal mush and milk, oatmeal and milk, rice and milk, boiled wheat and

THE CRAZE FOR COD LIVER OIL.

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milk, unleavened bread and milk have in them all the necessary elements of nutrition; hence from childhood to old age one never tires of them. If, owing to some abnormal condition of the stomach, milk does not digest, add thereto a little lime water.

The hot water cure in some European cities is giving way, in part, to the hot milk cure. The temperature should be as high as can be sipped with a teaspoon. While the heat is beneficial, especially if a little capsicum be added, the milk itself is nourishing.

The cod liver oil craze is rapidly subsiding. The most eminent physicians of Germany prefer fresh olive oil. In consumption, either olive oil or nice sweet cream is preferable to cod liver oil. A little olive oil mixed with oatmeat porridge constitutes a most excellent food.

Liebig pronounces oatmeal, so much used by Scotchmen, more nutritious and fattening than the best English beef. Professor Forbes, of Edinburgh, during a period of eighty years, measured the height and breadth and noticed the health of the students in the university. He found the Belgians, who were great meat eaters, at the bottom of the list; a little above them the French; very much higher the English, and the highest of all stood the Highland Scotch, who all through life are fed once, and generally twice, a day on oatmeal porridge. Whole wheat boiled four or five hours is a better food than oatmeal.

Breakfast should be made largely of wheaten grits, oatmeal, well-baked bread made from the whole wheaten grain carefully ground, berries, fruits, fresh eggs broken into hot water, and a cup of cream or good, sweet milk. Neither meat, butter or grease of any kind is necessary. Bread should be baked thoroughly and toasted. Nothing is more indigestible than dough or half-baked bread.

"When Senator Palmer, of Michigan, went to New York, and stopped at the Fifth Avenue Hotel," says the New York Times, "he always carried a loaf of graham bread in his satchel. Before going to his meals he cuts a couple of slices from the loaf

and puts them in his pocket. At the table he pulls the bread out and has always something before him he can eat. In his house at Detroit he has a mill constructed on purpose to prepare his flour, and at home he will never eat bread made from flour ground at any other mill."

"I cannot eat coarse brown bread," says one; "it irritates my sensitive stomach."

No one has asked you to eat "coarse bread," at least I have not; but I do ask and urge you to eat the wheat in its fulness,except the very thin, flinty, irritating outer covering, which the steel mill grinding discards, and yet retains the nutritious parts, the five layers of cells and all the valuable mineral matter.

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"I am a laborer, and cannot work on oatmeal, rice, mush, milk, and potatoes; on bread, vegetables, fruit, and berries,' says some honest tiller of the soil. How do you know? Did you ever try it? I have seen the porters of Smyrna, in Asia Minor, bearing burdens of six, seven, and eight hundred pounds, and that all day; and yet their food was a few handfuls of grapes and figs, or dry bread, a bunch of dates, and some olives.

I have seen the Spaniards and half-castes of Mexico, Yucatan, and Central America toiling in the mines, or by the olivepress and the wine-press by day, and dancing at night to the music of the guitar, and yet they subsist upon melons, fruits, bananas, and bread dipped in olive oil and seasoned with capsi

cum.

I have seen Chinamen in Canton and other parts of the empire bear upon their shoulders the sedan chair sixteen hours a day, or work in the fields the same length of time, and eat nothing but rice and a few vegetables.

All historians know that the old Roman armies, who built the roads and aqueducts, practiced in gymnasiums and marched under heavy baggage and armor conquering the world, lived largely upon fruits, dry wheat, and barley bread dipped in sour wine.

But are not flesh meats and fatty foods necessary to keep up the animal heat, especially in cold climates? The herb

ANIMAL FOOD MORE STIMULATING THAN NOURISHING.

III

eating animals and the fleet reindeer found in the Arctic regions are a sufficient answer to that inquiry. Besides, for great muscular strength the rhinoceros exceeds all animals known upon the earth; and yet it lives entirely upon vegetable food. Droves of tigers will fly with terror from before it knowing its power.

"Carbon is heat," says an eminent physiologist. And yet skim cheese, pearl barley, rye meal, seconds flour, beans, peas, rice, Indian meal, oatmeal, and sugar all contain more carbon than does beef; and, further, not only does the finely flavored cheese made in Cheddar, England, but even skim-milk cheese contains more muscle-making food than beef.

Animal food is more heating and stimulating than nourishing. Lions, tigers, hyenas, cats, crows, and buzzards are excessively fond of it. The Thayers, Pooles, Maces, Hyers, Sayers, Heenan's, Sullivan's, Fitzsimmon's, Corbett's, Sharkey's, who follow fisticuffing and practice the "manly art" of pounding their fellowmen, eat not only meats, but raw meats, to give them courage and animal strength. But Pythagoras, Plato, Plutarch, Diogenes, St. Chrysostum, the noblest of Roman philosophers, the wisest of the new platonists, and other royal-souled men of the past, were vegetarians. And in more modern times such distingushed men as John Wesley, Benjamin Franklin, Emanuel Swedenborg, John Howard, Sir Richard Philips, Shelley, Wordsworth, de Lamartine, and others abstained for a time, or wholly, from animal food, and, as several of them have intimated, greatly to their advantage.

Parker Pillsbury, the old veteran worker in anti-slavery, temperance, woman's rights, arbitration, and all the reforms that shed their kindling light upon this century, writes thus of vegetarianism:

"Some seven years ago there appeared to me reasons weighty, if not many, against human reasoning and reasonable beings descending to the bloody butchering business of preying upon the brute beasts below them to sustain material, mental, and spiritual existence. And even inordinately and unnaturally fattening them for so monstrous a purpose.

"Three or four years later my appetite for fish of every

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