juice is limited, as there is a limit of the milk that is to be drawn into the pail, can you not at once see the necessity of eating so slowly that hunger will be sated before you have exhausted the juice supply?

Listen to this statement: Every disease that afflicts mankind is a constitutional possibility developed into disease by more or less habitual eating in excess of the supply of gastric juice!!

Eating slowly guards against this danger by toning the appetite down before the danger point is reached. Slow eating renders the food more soluble, hence more favorable to the chemical forces involved in digestion. Slow eating favors the digestion of the starch in the foods through the action of the saliva upon it. You have been told that digestion is a tax on vital power, that, during its active stage, muscle and mental energy is correspondingly deficient, hence the sluggish feeling you will always experience after your dinners, which will be unduly heavy for a time.

I have also suggested that cheer of mind is as the draft to the flame in its stimulating power upon this function. This fact cannot be over-estimated in its importance as an habitual condition to be provided for after each meal, so far as there is power to summon it.

Have you any more important business, can you have, than to aid the stomach in every possible way while it is engaged in balancing an account that is to prevent disease from entering a mortgage upon your life?

Some of you have children; you will now more clearly see that the meal hour is not the time for lectures on moral reform, because you have an audience within your grasp; you will postpone the digestive, depressing chills until cheer and the highest social pleasures have sent new life through all the lives about

you; and, after digestive balances have been duly struck, then the moral shortage can be more serenely considered. You are also to keep alive the importance of not approaching your first meal unduly fatigued by which your eating will, by so much, fail to satisfy the need.

Now a supreme advantage of this method of creating an appetite and of so ordering the times of eating, is that you will actually eat more food on the average than you ever did before, digest a great deal more of what you do eat. How is this, you ask? You will do this by keeping your blood rich; with disease, even with microbe, defying power. Your health will reach such a high average, you will be habitually so much. stronger that you will miss very many less meals, because you will miss the ailments, slight or great, that probibit them. They who can eat three meals daily and keep it up month in and month out, are a small per cent. of the people.

Now you are to abolish your breakfast and never presume to eat again without keen hunger; this hunger you may have if you wait for it, even while sitting in an arm-chair or lying in bed, and it will be for food as nourishing as the axman requires. What shall be eaten at each meal will be a law for self to determine. No food is good or healthful and therefore typical, without a special demand for it. Keen hunger, the most relishing of foods, thoroughly masticated, a recreative state of mind during digestion, these are the easily-acquired conditions behind sustained health.

The second meal of the day should be so light that it can be duly digested before entrance upon sleep. But this raises an unsettled question-is there need of digestion during sleep?

Let us consider; there is very little destructive

demand for food going on during sleep, the vital machinery therefore requiring very little fuel! Digestion therefore, and necessarily, will be a very slow process. The lying posture is not favorable to the peristaltic sweep of the food around the stomach.

The brain can suffer no loss by reason of an empty stomach, therefore if it is not subjected to the taxing power of digestion, the sleep ought to be more perfect. It has been found by those who have adopted the twomeal method that a second meal unduly large is always followed by diminished mental and physical power during the following forenoon.

It has been found in repeated instances that if the stomach is permitted to rest during the night, it has a marked increase of functional power during the following day. From my own experience, and what I have learned from others, in connection with the fact that the brain will be duly cared for, I have no doubt that the stomach needs to be kept empty during sleep. This question is one of vital importance, but fortunately is one that can be solved by experience, and permanently solved.

You are now ready to ask, how about this method of living as applied to those engaged in manual labor? I did not for a long time attack the breakfast table of laborers. In this as in all other respects the progress of the diet mode in the enlargement of the general health of the people, was a matter of evolution in which each advancing step that was made had a revelation behind it. As soon as I began to get people to abandon or scale down their morning meals, I began to get results; surprises to explain, and that served to push on to other steps as I was all the more watchful for results because of the intense opposition that met my progress in every step of the way. Very often it appeared that my business annihilation seemed likely to be involved.

It is said that a certain Athenian philosopher once offered a theory as to the origin of the world that did not at all suit the minds of his fellow Athenians, and straightway they confuted his doctrine by banishing him from the city. The doctrine that I began to teach was, in the public estimate, a great heresy, and it had to meet Athenian logic without its power of suppression.

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I once saw a powerful man bracing himself against a door. There was abject terror in every line of expression, and his face was streaming with perspiration, and every muscle was drawn to a steel-like rigidity, for his life depended on his herculean efforts to keep the robbers out that existed in a brain crazed with strong drink. And the uninstructed people braced themselves against this new gospel of peace and good-will among all men.” Indeed there came a time when my services at a very sick bed were involved somewhat in a defensive attack against the superstitious fears from without, because of methods that were deemed homicidal. Those were the old dark days when sometimes the pressure was scarcely endurable and I would fall back on this philosophy. "My own life has been saved and a new lease granted of greatly enlarged mental and physical force. I was becoming a wreck, the wreckage had only left its scars and memories. And my family were being benefited; those boys were growing into manhood with health habits established, that as a heritage would be beyond any estimate in a pecuniary sense.”

What is the rich man's millions to him as he sits down to his table with a stomach that will not hold a teaspoonful of food without a protest of agony?

And then the happier faces I would meet on the streets, or in the brighter homes, would be like the fresh brigade to the wavering line of battle.

LECTURE XIV.

EVOLUTION OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE,

(Continued).

ABILITY TO LABOR DURING A FORENOON WITHOUT A BREAKFAST DEMONSTRATED BY CASES

My Friends the Readers :

You are interested to know how the method succeeded in its attack on the breakfast table of the manual laborer. I am able to say that I did not begin the attack. There chanced to come into my office a farmer from some miles beyond my circuit, with a variety of ills to open up to me. His complaints of rheumatism, of stiffened joints, of the persistent cough and of his broken-up, broken-down condition generally were couched in all the language necessary to portray them in vivid outline. He was beyond his sixtieth year and of a most resolute, ambitious, persevering nature.

I was in a rather unusually garrulous mood, and so I attacked him with a lecture on health culture, and let him depart without a bottle. He was simply to take a breakfast of coffee and hold off until dinner for his solid food. I omitted, however, unintentionally, to suggest that as soon as he became able to go about his affairs, by reason of better health, he could begin with the breakfast again, but that it must be lighter than before.

This call was during the autumn. I saw nothing of