requires it will consume a moderate quantity only at a time, and so require another meal before a long interval.

The nearest approach to the digestion of children is that of convalescents after exhausting illness. In strumous children, a diet more nutritious and stimulating is required. In age, which is second childhood, frequent and moderate meals again are necessary; but they must not consist in any large proportion of liquid aliment, like those of young children and convalescents: and they require to be both nutritive and stimulant.

In those, whose physical strength is largely drawn upon, in nursing women, in men in training for athletic feats, a diet at the same time nutritive and stimulating, and plentiful, and repeated meals, are necessary.

To grown up persons, in health, but with no similar calls upon their strength, meals few and sparing, varied in quality, nutritious, but neither too easy of digestion, nor combining adventitious stimulants, and just hearty enough to prevent craving for food at intermediate hours, are to be studied. The general tendency in the strong and the healthy is to overload the stomach: with such the appetite commonly exceeds the powers of digestion; and the rule to be constantly borne in mind in respect to diet (as to everything else) is moderation and self-restraint.

These heads, and the views to which they lead, having been fully gone into in the work already referred to, I hence proceed to wind off the thread of practical observations and advice, which I propose should constitute the present chapter.

We may assume it to be true, that men in good health, and not taking violent exercise, for the most part eat too much food, and would be the better for reducing their diet; and carrying the same principle into derangement of the system and ill-health, we may safely lay it down, that the greater number of complaints may be benefited, if not cured, by abstinence. But physicians have to study exceptions as well as rules: if the latter are the first learnt, and the most obvious, the discrimination of the former, or the distinguishing those cases to which common rules do not apply, is the more difficult part of medicine and surgery. Or, deviations from common rules depend upon other rules of more partial application, which have to be sought when the first are known.

So, in the present case, it is true that digestion is an effort, the toil of an organ, which exhausts its powers, and sympathetically lowers for a time the tone of the system; that a full meal, to a certain extent, oppresses the vital economy, which, so overborne, only recovers its forces, after the up-hill labour of digestion has been accomplished. But it is not less true, that food taken in moderation,

and when wanted, independently of the nutriment it contains, and before that is conveyed into the circulation, and while digestion is beginning and in progress, directly and immediately renovates and invigorates.

To give an example,―a very learned and distinguished person told me, in conversation on the subject of digestion, that his brother, a middle-aged man, not deficient in muscular strength, and leading a country life, is compelled to take his breakfast immediately on rising. If, instead of this, he begins the day with exercise or study, he becomes speedily exhausted, and remains so for the rest of the day. My informant had been struck with his brother's idiosyncrasy, as, in his own case, things are just reversed. To enable him to go through the mental and bodily exertion of the day, it is necessary that he should eat nothing for three or four hours after rising. His stomach, it appears, does not wake as soon as his brain: that languor of digestion, which sleep induces, is not with him shaken off till some time after rising.

His brother's case is pertinent to my present argument. To mention another:-a gentleman, aged fifty-four, is under my care, who, with a pulse which varies from twenty-one to twenty-nine beats in a second, is in perfect health, with this drawback, that he has had two epileptic fits, one severe, the other transient, and several threaten

ings. The worry of business in which he is engaged, the mental excitement and exhaustion consequent upon it, are attended in him with a sensation that he will lose himself, which stimulants and quiet, when at the worst, have removed. In his ordinary habits, this gentleman does not feel himself secure (and as he has learned by experience with reason), unless he takes a cup of tea and a slice of bread and butter in bed before rising, his hour of rising being seven, and his subsequent breakfast-hour nine. After more excitement of business than usual the day before, he adds some brandy to his dose of tea, of the necessity of which his feelings of greater depression and physical alarm on waking now advertise him. Such a case, in which circumstances have produced a lowered tone of body, conveys, indeed, a great deal more than I have advanced it to illustrate, but it strikingly exemplifies the principle, that food may be used, in fitting circumstances, as a direct or necessary stimulant.

The following instance exemplifies the same fact in one of a very different habit of body. A gentleman, aged sixty, tall, large in person, who has had two or three threatenings of an apoplectic seizure (for which I have attended him, and which have been averted by prompt and copious depletion, by cupping and aperient medicine), is in the habit of eating, not in excess, but heartily, at break

fast and dinner. But he finds these two nutritious meals insufficient, and after being engaged in business in the fore part of the day, is liable to sensations of sinking, alternating with palpitation of the heart, unless he eats a meat luncheon, and drinks with it a glass of porter. I am sure that this gentleman could not preserve his health without this third meal; yet his system is full and plethoric, although, at the same time, inclining to relaxation. A person of greater physical vigour would not feel the want of a third meal; a spare person, not of the first strength, would want it, and have no doubt about, and obviously incur no risk in taking it.

It is a rule of dietetics not to load the stomach immediately before sleep. But this has likewise occasionally to yield to the principle I am now illustrating, the use of food as a stimulant.

A gentleman, about forty years of age, when living, in point of diet, as he thought, very carefully, exceeded his strength by superadding literary labour to professional business; at length, night after night, he found himself, on going to bed, chilly, disposed to shiver, his pulse like a thread, with an unpleasant tendency to lose himself, and a feeling as if he would faint, joined with vertigo. These sensations he at first relieved by drinking hot water and sal volatile, and hot water and brandy, upon which the action of the heart