THIS subject has many points of view which must be considered before anything like a definite and satisfactory conclusion can be reached.

As I understand the question, it is an effort to determine what kind of diet, other things being equal, will produce the greatest muscular power and endurance.

A complete discussion of this subject would require a thorough knowledge of all of the laws and processes of nutrition, and nutrition is a very complex process, having many indispensable factors. While we do not, and, perhaps, never may, know all the secrets of nutritive processes, we are familiar with many of the most important and practical ones, and we know that there is no truth in the old adage that "the eating of a part strengthens a corresponding part." If this were true the diet of many people should consist principally of brains.

The eating of meat does not necessarily favor the growth of the muscles of the eater. Both observation and experience teach us that, in regard to nutrition and muscular development, man does not differ from the lower animals, and the animals possessing the most muscular power and endurance are, not the carnivora, but the herbivora-the grain eaters.

Muscular power does not altogether depend upon the size of the muscles through which it is expressed; the quality of the muscular make up is a factor which must be reckoned with. For, just as surely as soil of a suitable kind will produce a ripened

product superior to that developed in a soil of a less favorable nature, so surely will the quality of muscular growth be affected by the kind of food from which the muscle is formed.

Another matter to be considered is the nervous force or energy behind the muscles which enables them to act, for, in reality, muscle is but an instrument through which vital power, emanating from the brain, and conveyed by the nerves, is manifested. As the power displayed by an engine varies with the amount of pressure of the steam supplied, so will the energy exerted by the muscles be greater or less according to the degree of nervous force which furnishes them with the stimulus to action. The diet, therefore, which contributes most to muscular strength and energy is that which, at the same time, contributes most to making the nerves active and strong.

Another very important law of nutrition -one which is altogether too frequently either ignorantly overlooked, or wilfully ignored, especially by all sufferers from dyspepsia-is that, physiologically, expenditures always control supplies. This is a short and simple statement, but one of vast significance. Put in another form, perhaps more easily understood, the system will not and can not digest and assimilate more tood of any kind, at any time, than that for which it has a legitimate use. Any excess of this amount must be either gotten rid of at considerable cost of labor on the part of the eliminative organs, or else stored up as use

less fat, which only hinders and obstructs the freedom and activity of some vital function. Hence it follows that even the food most suitable for muscular development will avail nothing unless a legitimate demand for its use is made by the part which it is designed to nourish. Herein lies the secret of the value of physical exercise for developing muscular growth and power.

Lastly, because nutrition is, largely, a chemical process, oxygen is as necessary, for nutritive purposes, as food. The service it performs is a double one. When it has entered the blood, by way of the lungs, it assists elimination by uniting with and destroying the residual, nutritive elements of food from which all vitality has been exhausted, and, at the same time, combines with fresh food supplies to convert them into new nutritive material for immediate

use.

After this hasty mention of the principal factors which enter into and control nutritive action, there should be but little if any difficulty in deciding what kind of diet will best subserve the purpose indicated by our subject. In a general way it is that which contains both nitrogenous (muscle-making) and phosphatic (nerve-supplying elements in a form most easily digested and assimilated.

I have no hesitancy in expressing my belief that, independent of all sentiment in regard either to the lack of necessity or the wickedness of taking animal life, this ideal diet is one of which animal flesh forms no part.

The excessive use of meat (and in this case a very little is excessive) is the cause of a great many ills of civilized life. While easily digested as far as the stomach is concerned, the nutritive elements of meat are hard to oxidize, and its uncompleted waste products become in many ways a source of disease. Besides, as Doctor George H. Taylor has truly said, "the organism of animals whose flesh is used for food, has rejected such ingredients as are not useful for its own needs. Among such

ingredients are the phosphatic salts which are demanded by the larger development and higher functional requirements of the nervous systems of man. This class of salts is not retained in the flesh of animals to an amount necessary for adequate support of nervous function of men of high intelligence and active sensibilities."

20 West 59th Street.

DIET FOR BRAIN WORKERS.

IT IS all right, says a writer in The Sanitary Record, for a man who labors all day in the open air to eat freely; but the man of sedentary habits, the brain worker, must. adapt his way of living to his needs. He must be well nourished, for his brain is incapable of good work unless well supplied with pure blood, but such a man cannot possibly furnish vital force to digest three large meals daily. If he tries it, nature will protest at every step. The chemical changes of digestion will be imperfectly performed. The stomach will neither secrete freely nor churn the food with cheerful alacrity; the pyloric orifice contracts and allows such chyme to pass with grudging reluctance; the intestinal lacteals are ashamed to absorb such miserable pabulum, which chokes, irritates and congests them, so the large meal remains in the digestive organs to ferment, putrefy, and steep the individual in foul gases and depraved secretions. But the system can furnish enough vital force to convert a small meal into pabulum of high standard, which will be absorbed without difficulty. Three such small meals are not enough to keep the individual properly nourished, however; four to six will be required. Each should consist of but one or at least two articles of food, the diet to be varied by changes at meals. The portion of food served must be small; the patient must stop as soon as the appetite is satisfied, and gaseous distention is proof positive that the meals are still too large or too close together.-Medical Record.

HARD AND SOFT WHEAT FLOURS.

WHILE hard wheat flour is a most excellent bread-making flour that is in demand by many bakers and the foreign trade, because of its strength and the greater quantity of water it will absorb, the majority of the American people cling with an old-time fondness to the soft wheat flour. It is a most excellent bread-making flour, and contains to a very high degree all of the requisites for sustaining life and making and maintaining tissue. It is fully equal, when all of the points are considered, to any hard wheat flour.

The hard wheat contains more gluten than the soft, which makes it quite valuable to the human family in its line of business as a sustainer of life and strength, but otherwise it possesses no value or virtue as human food not possessed by the soft wheat.

It is this same gluten that makes the imperfect Kansas wheat of the present season appear to make better flour than the more perfect wheat of last year, but it is more apparent than real when all the factors are considered.

As indicated, hard wheat flour is considered of value not only to domestic commercial bakers, but to the foreign trade, because foreigners use baker's bread more generally than do Americans. The hard wheat flour is more valuable to that class of trade because it takes up more water and makes more loaves of bread to a given quantity of flour than does soft wheat flour. The bakers sell more water and less flour than when using soft wheat flour, and hence have, or ought to have, larger profits. As water is of but little value in making tissue and sustaining life, it is difficult to see wherein the hard wheat flour is much superior, if, indeed, in any way better than soft wheat flour for human food.

However, both are American products, both are good and both require the support of all interested in the growth of American wheat and the manufacture of American flour.-American Miller.

DIET IN NEURASTH 'NIA.

NEXT in importance to rest and properly regulated exercise is diet. When we consider that nearly every digestive disturbance which by failure to provide proper nourishment for the exhausted organism, together with the resultant autotoxemia, becomes one of the most important factors in the causation of the disorder, we can appreciate the importance of giving due attention to diet. The carbohydrates, as giving rise to fermentation and interfering with the digestion and assimilation of nitrogenous foods, should be avoided as much as possible. According to Brower beef, mutton and eggs should form the basis of the dietary. In addition to milk, malted milk, or a combination of the two, may be used advantageously. It will sometimes be necessary to resort to predigested foods until the digestive organs have regained their tone somewhat. Tea and coffee should be avoided entirely, not only because of their detrimental influence upon the nervous system, but because of their interference with digestion. Fluids in any quantity dilute the digestive juices and impair their action, and should, therefore, be taken at other than meal times, preferably upon rising in the morning and an hour before meals, hot water being best, to which may be added to advantage in some cases a teaspoonful of Carlsbad salts.-Phil. Med. Journal.

THE FOOD VALUE OF MILK. BY WILBET J. FRASER, ILLINOIS EXPERIMENT STATION.

MILK furnishes all the constituents necessary to nourish the body, keep it in repair, and nourish warmth and energy for work. A quart of average milk will furnish about the same amount of nutrition as threefourths of a pound of meat; and if its true food value were fully appreciated, milk would be used much more freely than it now

is, to the advantage of both the health and economical sustenance of the people. Each person consumes an average of twenty-five and a half-gallons of milk in a year, or an ordinary tumblerful each day. Although this is one of the great dairy countries of the world we do not consume more than onethird the amount of milk per capita that is used in some European countries. This is doubtless due to the failure of Americans to appreciate its food value. In this country. it is generally used as a condiment in tea or coffee, on berries and fruit, or for a beverage when drunk all and not as a regular article of food as are bread, neat and po

tatoes.

Many who understand that milk varies in composition think that its food value is based entirely upon the amount of butterfat which it contains. While it is true that the fat in milk is a very important factor, it is also true that skim milk containing little or no fat has yet a high food value. Skim milk has practically the same composition as whole milk, with the exception of butterfat which has been removed in the cream, and for supplying the body with albuminoids alone is worth exactly the same, quart for quart, as whole milk. Since the albuminoids are lacking in the diet of many people, especially those who do not eat meat freely, skim milk would be a valuable and economical adjunct to their food.

BEANS A MAINSTAY.

"Beans are the soldier's mainstay," says Thomas P. Dillon, a retired United States cavalry officer. "The American soldier, at a pinch, can equal the performance of an Arab on a handful of dried dates-he can ride and fight all day on a mere handful of beans, properly prepared. There is nothing to equal the army baked bean. Your celebrated 'Boston baked' are but a poor imitation of the succulent article turned out by a regular army cook. There's an art in cooking them that nobody but an army man ever

acquires. I've been on service when for a week at a time our menu consisted of beans for breakfast, beans for dinner and beans for supper; and did the troopers tire of the monotony? Not a bit of it. They sang for more, and in spite of hard work and lack of variety at mess the fellows actually got fat. That demonstrated to me the nutritive quality of beans, and I made it a point to get into the good graces of the cook and learn how to bake them. It isn't such an elaborate process, but there's a trick in doing it right. My friends are all fond of beans the way I cook them, and many a time I've been asked for the recipe, but that's a thing I don't give away to every one. You see, people enjoy a dish all the better when they know it's something that not everybody can get up. It might take some of the zest away if they could say of my beans: "I know how to make them."-Philadelphia Record.

CONCENTRATED FOODS.

THERE is a prevalent idea in the profession that foods can be concentrated. This thought finds its reflection in the advertising pages of medical journals in the highlycolored claims of manufacturers of prepared foods. The three main constituents, proteid, carbohydrate, and fat, are represented by such typical examples as meat, sugar, and fat. Meats may have their water driven off and be reduced to powder form; in this way their bulk is diminished to about onefifth their former quantity, but in order to be taken and absorbed they must have the water restored to them. Sugar is practically water-free, and represents the most concentrated form of carbohydrate available. Fats in the form of butter contain nearly 90 per cent. of carbohydrate. A greater concentration of fat than is contained in these natural products is not possible, and for the most part the manufactured-food products contain far less units of energy than do the natural products. About the only purpose for which concentrated foods are useful is

in furnishing the nutriment in a more palatable form, or else, if it has been acted upon by certain digestive ferments, in such a way as to facilitate its absorption. As a matter of fact, it is rare that predigested foods are required. If a stomach is capable of passing the food on into the intestines, there is such an excess of digestive capacity in most individuals that it will be dealt with in such a way as to permit of its absorption.-Medicine.

BEDS AND BED COVERINGS.

WHAT constitutes a good bed and suitable covering for the night?

The answers to this conundrum could hardly be classified from boarding-house and country-hotel experiences. Some people generously try to smother or lose their guests in seas of feathers; many offer pillows small and soft enough to play hide-andseek with the unsupported head all the night long; but the crowning atrocity is the widely prevalent attempt to substitute blankets by heavy, sodden coverlids, holding down their victims with sheer brute force of avoirdupois (like the marble slabs which disfigure the graves of many departed), causing dreams of premature burial or midnight robbery by superincumbent burglars.

IN MANY CASES

it may be a question of necessary economy, but in others it is pure meanness, or a survival from those crude days of domestic decorative art when huge, flaring patterns were the fashion, and the well-named family of "crazy quilts" came into existence to disquiet the æsthetic brain in its hours of repose.

The writer commends these plaints to the proper philanthropic agencies. They voice genuine public needs, and it is deeply to be regretted that temperance reformers do not add the elements of radical reform in cooking methods to their excellent aims for humanity.

Intemperance would be shorn of half its seductive potency by an improvement all along the line of bodily nutrition.

Poorly-nourished, nerve-starved creatures. have irresistible cravings for relief from bodily and mental misery.

Feed them better, clothe and warm them first, then preach morality—is the divinely ordained method of reform.

蛋蛋

MEN AND WOMEN IN THE SICKROOM.

WE find this merited tribute to the constancy and tireless endurance of woman in her ministrations to the sick, in London Health:

It has often been remarked that in sickness there is no hand like a woman's hand, no heart like a woman's heart, and there is not. A man's breast may swell with unutterable sorrow, and apprehension may rend his mind, yet place him by the sick couch and in the shadow rather than the light of the sad lamp that watches it; let him have to count over the long, dull hours of night, and wait alone and sleepless the struggle of the gray dawn into the chamber of the suffering; let him be appointed to this ministry even for the sake of the brother of his heart, or the father of his being, and his grosser nature, even where it is most perfect, will tire; his eye will close, and his spirit grow impatient of the dreary task. Though love and anxiety remain undiminished, his mind will own to itself a creeping in of irresistible selfishness, of which, indeed, he may be ashamed, and which he may struggle to reject, but which, despite all his efforts, remains to characterize his nature, and prove, in one instance, his manly weakness. But see a mother, a sister, or a wife in this place. The woman feels no weariness, and owns no recollection of self. In silence, and in the depth of night she dwells, not only passively, but, so far as the qualified term may express our meaning, joyously. Her ear acquires a blind man's