169
it.
There is no harm in a man's experimenting
with
opium-smoking
or
feeding
on
nuts;
but
the
moment
he ceases
to
examine,
to
act
from
habit
and
without
reflection,
he
is
in
trouble.
We
all
of us
eat
too
niucli,
l)ecause people,
liveried
and obsequious,
have always bustled
up
five times daily
with
six
months'
provisions,
and it was
less
trouble
to
feed and
be
done
with
it,
than
to examine
the
question
whether
we
were hungry.
If you cook
your own food, you
soon find that you don't
rook more or less than you want;
and health
returns.
If, however,
you
go to the other extreme
and think of nothing
but diet, you are almost
sure to acquire
that typical
form of melancholia,
in which
the patient
is
convinced
that
all
the
world
is
in
league
to
poison
him.
Professor
Schweinhund
has shown
that beef
causes
gout;
Professor
Naschtikoff
proves that milk causes consumption.
Sir Ruffon Wratts tells us that old
age
is
brought
on by eating cabbage.
By and by you
reach
the state of
which
Mr.
Hereward Carrington
makes
his
proud
boast:
your
sole
food
is
chocolate,
which
you
chew unceasingly,
even
in
your
dreams.
Yet no sooner have you taken
it
into you than you awake to the terrible
truth
demonstrated
by Guterbock
Q.
Hosenscheisser,
Fourth
Avenue,
Grand Rapids, that
chocolate
is
the
cause of constipation,
and
con-
stipation
of cancer,
and proceed
to
get
it
out of you by means of an
enema which
would
frighten
a
camel into convulsions.
A
similar
madness
attacks
even
real
men
of science.
Metchnikoff