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"Of right choice food are his meals, I ween."

Now as to what you should eat, what you should not eat, and how you should eat. This is perhaps the greatest problem for a man to solve. A man with a bad digestive apparatus is practically an invalid. We have no hesitation in saying that there is as much bodily injury done by over and careless eating among people commonly called temperate as among those who drink alcoholic liquors to a large extent. If you would preserve your vital strength and capabilities for a happy, long period, mind your diet. Don't rest too much on the insane idea that you have a stomach of iron and that you can digest shingle nails. You are not a species of the genus ostrich, or goat. Then if you really do possess organs that can take care of all kinds of food, their splendid power should not be destroyed or even weakened by improper indulgence. The mightiest engine is soon as valueless as old iron if it is continually exerted to its greatest velocity. If inanimate mechanism cannot stand a permanent strain surely bodily flesh would be quickly disabled.

Some foods are particularly muscle formers, others produce fat, and still others brain and nerve, while most of the common articles of diet combine these uses in varying degrees.

But the question to cover our entire physical needs requires to be broadened into this: What combination of food will best nourish the body? Even then the answer must be modified to suit individual cases, for the digestive power differs greatly in different persons. Moreover, there is an interdependence between the different bodily organs and tissues, so that the body must be built up as a whole. If one part lacks the whole suffers, and if one part is overfed the others will be underfed.

Thus a person who becomes unduly fat loses in muscular fiber, either in quantity or quality. One who overfeeds the brain loses in muscular strength. So, too, muscular development may be carried to such excess as to impoverish the brain, and also to reduce the fat of the body below what is necessary both as surplus food laid up for emergencies, and as a protection against sudden changes of temperature.

The best food for producing muscle, therefore, must, while being duly appetizing, contain a large per cent of nitrates for the muscles, of phosphates for the brain and nerves, and of carbonates for the fat.

Of nitrates, beans stand at 24 per cent, then peas at 22, cabbage and salmon at 20, oats at 17, eggs and veal at 16, and beef at 15.

Of phosphates, salmon stands first at 7, then codfish at 6, beef and eggs at 5, beans and veal at 4, and cabbage, peas, and oats at 3.

Of carbonates, butter stands at the head at 100, rice at 80, corn and rye at 72, wheat at 69, oats at 66, peas at 60, beans at 57, and cabbage at 46.

Fresh codfish fried in fat or served with butter gravy about equals beef in all respects, and so do eggs fried in fat. But we must add:—

The mere eating of food cannot make muscle. The muscles must be called into vigorous daily exercise, yet without overdoing.

Excessive eating is weakening, and must be avoided. It is the amount digested and assimilated that tells, not the quantity taken into the stomach.

All the laws of health must be steadily observed. We are in favor of a diet that excludes meat entirely; and once a day should be the excess of those who indulge in the flesh-eating luxury. A suspicion that there is a difference between merely getting food down into the stomach and its digestion, is abroad, and that a peach, an orange, an apple, a spoonful of flour, or something similar, which is digested, is really better for a man than a beefsteak, which simply passes through the alimentary canal. See "Food" for further consideration of vegetarianism.

For breakfast have any of the numerous preparations of mush, such as oatmeal, cracked wheat, and germea, every other day some kind of fish; of the miscellaneous, potatoes baked or boiled, eggs poached, boiled, or omelette, and natural fruit; of drinks, water, filtered or boiled, and not below 56° Fahr., milk, pure and sweet but not cream, cocoa, chocolate, tea, or coffee. These are good and beneficial in the order they are placed. The following from the N. Y. Medical Record is invaluable information:—

"Stimulants (drink most healthful).—Milk heated to much above 100 degrees Fahrenheit loses for a time a degree of its sweetness and density. No one who, fatigued by over-exertion of body or mind, has ever experienced the reviving influence of a tumbler of this beverage, heated as warm as it can be sipped, will willingly forego a resort to it because of its being rendered somewhat less acceptable to the palate. The promptness with which its cordial influence is felt is indeed surprising. Some portion of it seems to be digested and appropriated almost immediately, and many who now fancy they need alcoholic stimulants when exhausted by fatigue will find in this simple draught an equivalent that will be abundantly satisfying and far more enduring in its effects. There is many an ignorant overworked woman who fancies she could not keep up without her beer; she mistakes its momentary exhilaration for strength, and applies the whip instead of nourishment to her poor, exhausted frame. Any honest, intelligent physician will tell her that there is more real strength and nourishment in a slice of bread than in a quart of beer; but if she loves stimulants it would be a very useless piece of information. It is claimed that some of the lady clerks in our own city, and those too who are employed in respectable business houses, are in the habit of ordering ale or beer at the restaurants. They probably claim that they are 'tired,' and no one who sees their faithful devotion to customers all day will doubt their assertions. But they should not mistake beer for a blessing or stimulus for strength. A careful examination of statistics will prove that men and women who do not drink can endure more hardships, and do more work, and live longer, than those less temperate."

If you must eat meat for breakfast, have your steak rare, mutton chops well done; if fish, always well done; and if each are fried, use butter, not lard—the same applies to everything else that has to be fried. All meats are sweeter and more healthful broiled than fried. Of bread, for health, natural graham comes first; and, in order of nutrition, corn, corn and wheat mixed, rye, and wheat. They should be taken cold and at least twenty-four hours after baking. If the midday meal is a lunch, all dishes should be cold. It can be made up largely from dishes left over from the morning meal, such as cold cracked wheat with milk, natural fruit; add nuts, sauces, jellies, and prepared fruit.

If dinner is taken at noon instead of lunch at that hour, any one of the score of vegetable soups are first in value; all other kinds are secondary; let there be from three to six kinds of vegetables cooked; any of the drinks mentioned for breakfast may be used, but none of them iced; cold bread, and no pastry unless an open pie with unshortened undercrust. An excellent morsel for dyspeptics is sea biscuit dipped in cold water and then placed in a hot oven from three to five minutes. If meat is to be a portion of this meal, you can have beef, mutton, or venison, roasted or broiled, the former rare, and the two latter well done. Provided dinner is enjoyed at the close of the day, it should occur before 5:30 p. m.; if at midday, then the lunch meal can be renamed supper, and can be partaken of as late as 6 or 7 p. m. Let there be no eating two meals for Sundays and holidays, and three for other days, or indulging in them at later hours in the morning and earlier in the evening; for this irregularity will detriment more than many kinds of improper food.

Do not eat fresh pork, for this and every other kind of swine flesh is an abomination. Eat no kidney, liver, or tripe; deal sparingly with fowl and all the bird family. Outside impure water and uncleanliness, there can be but one cause for skin diseases, eczema, boils, and the dread leprosy, which is the eating of pork, kidney, liver, duck, etc. If the lion indiscriminately kills and eats all kinds of flesh, and thereby is made ferocious, if the lamb is rendered passive and inoffensive by grasses and grains, then what the swine or different domestic fowls eat must have something to do with the make-up of the flesh of their bodies. The hog is the most filthy animal of that nature, while chicken and duck are the most so in the line of fowls used by man for food. It is offensive but true that they will not only eat but relish both their own and man's excrement.

We cannot use space foolishly, if we show plainly why pork should be abandoned. Did you ever stop to think on what most swine live? Swill is the most common term for it. Anything and everything that is the refuse of a boarding-house will they eagerly devour. Give them rotten apples and potatoes, full of innumerable microbes, and they will relish the repast. Place them in a dung heap—they will root, and eat much of what they find. Now all meat, all flesh and tissue, is made from what an animal or person eats—if he doesn't eat he grows thin and starves. Then the hog's flesh is made from elements derived from swill, decayed substances, and everything either cooked, uncooked, or even digested, that man is through with or has cast off. You who eat pork relish that which once you have refused to eat—only in another form. Can you enjoy this meat when you consider all this? Surely its use means bad health and contamination. Skin diseases and poor complexions are found almost entirely among those who live on these improper foods. Again, even if you feed swine on clean corn, milk, and water, we ascertain by careful experiment and examination that pork is most susceptible to bacteria of almost any meat. Better boycott it altogether. Leprosy and skin troubles are found largely among pork-eating people—such as the inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands, where there are 749 lepers. On the other hand, Jews, who everywhere are marked with clear skins, avoid pork. In Constantinople there are 250 lepers, in Crete upwards of 3,000, and quantities in the islands of eastern Mediterranean Sea, and 1,000 in Norway. These places are all characterized by the great amount of pork, and duck too, that they consume.

Other things not good for invalids, and will make strong persons invalids, are: Fried potatoes, hot cakes, warm bread, pound cake, green cucumbers, and rich pie-crust. Eat only those things that will excite the salivary glands to assist digestion. The walls, not the center of the alimentary canal, need attention.

Have your soup cool enough so that it will not cause tears in your eyes when you swallow—same with your coffee, tea, and other warm drinks; take no ice drinks; if you are used to having water only with your meals, drink it warm with sugar and milk, and not hot. If you are obliged to live in a second-class boarding-house or restaurant, and are obliged to take one of three meals each day at such a place, insist on having a napkin. Use it first to wipe your glass for water, then follow by polishing every utensil set before you for use at your meal. If note is taken of the napkin before and after each meal, you will be able by a mathematical calculation to tell just how much real estate did not belong to you.

How you should eat: Begin with one swallow of cool water. Eat slowly; take full 20 minutes for a hurried meal, and 45 minutes when you have the time. If you eat beefsteak, have it rare; if mutton chops, have them well done; if fish, well done and brown; if potatoes, first choice, baked; second, boiled; third, stewed or mashed. Never eat decayed vegetables or fruit; have them fresh or do without them. At table, see that the conversation is pleasant and mirthful. Should any of the younger members of the family insist, at each meal, in changing this order of things, cause them for a short season to sit at a separate table in the kitchen, until this sort of disease—for disease it is—may be cured. Nothing retards digestion, brings dyspepsia, or creates neuralgia, to such extent as a sullen disposition. We will end this chapter with a remarkably bright paraphrase on the ten commandments, which we recently ran across:—

THE TEN HEALTH COMMANDMENTS.

"1. Thou shalt have no other food than at meal-time.

"2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any pies, or put into pastry the likeness of anything that is in the heavens above or in the waters under the earth. Thou shalt not fall to eating it or trying to digest it. For the dyspepsia will be visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation of them that eat pie; and long life and vigor upon those that live prudently and keep the laws of health.

"3. Remember thy bread to bake it well; for he will not be kept sound that eateth his bread as dough.

"4. Thou shalt not indulge sorrow or borrow anxiety in vain.

"5. Six days shalt thou wash and keep thyself clean, and the seventh thou shalt take a great bath; thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy man-servant, and thy maid-servant, and the stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days man sweats and gathers filth and bacteria enough for disease; wherefore the Lord has blessed the bath-tub and hallowed it.

"6. Remember thy sitting-room and bed-chamber to keep them ventilated, that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

"7. Thou shalt not eat hot biscuit.

"8. Thou shalt not eat thy meat fried.

"9. Thou shalt not swallow thy food unchewed, or highly spiced, or just before hard work, or just after it.

"10. Thou shalt not keep late hours in thy neighbor's house, nor with thy neighbor's wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his cards, nor his glass, nor with anything that is thy neighbor's."—New England Farmer.

With the use of the foregoing as a guide, and ordinary judgment in the affairs with your fellow-men, life will run smoothly, happiness will follow, and a long life be the result.