1.  All unripe fruits, especially, if eaten raw and uncooked—­let the season, or prevalent disease, or individual, be what or who it may—­are unwholesome.

2.  Excess, in the use of the most wholesome fruits, under any circumstances, is also injurious.

3.  Fruits, eaten immediately after a full meal, when the stomach is in an improper condition for receiving anything more, contribute to overtask the digestive powers, and must hence produce more or less of injury.

4.  The skins and kernels of the larger fruits are unwholesome, because indigestible.  The skins of fruits, if beaten or masticated finely; may appear to be digested, because dissolved; but I have already endeavored to show that solution is not always digestion.

5.  Fruits of all kinds are most wholesome in their own country, and in their own appropriate season.

6.  Dried fruits are less wholesome than fresh.

7.  Fruit of all kinds should be withheld from infants, until they have teeth.

Thus far, as I have already said, all agree; at least so far as I know.  There are several other points on which medical men are generally agreed, though not universally.  One of these is, that fruits, if eaten at all, should usually form a part of a regular meal.  Another is, that it is better not to eat them immediately before going to bed.

There are contradictory opinions among the mass of the community, physicians as well as others, on the general intention of our summer fruits.  From the fact that children’s diseases prevail more at the season of the year when fruits are more abundant, many think the fruits are the immediate cause of them.  Others, and with better reason, suppose that the latter are intended by the Author of nature to check or prevent the bowel diseases of summer.

Nothing, certainly, is more unnatural than to suppose that at the very season of the year when so many other influences combine to awaken a tendency to disease in the human system, the Creator should place before our eyes an abundance of fruits, inviting us by all their cooling and tempting properties, only to do us mischief.  On the contrary, it seems to me much more probable that many of them were designed for our moderate use.  In what quantity, under what circumstances, and which are best, it is left to human experience to determine.

Some say that fruit should never be eaten in the morning, before breakfast.  Now everything I know of the human constitution, together with what I have learned from experience and observation, has been for years leading me to the contrary opinion.  Indeed, I am most fully convinced, that of all periods for eating fruit, whether we use it alone or make it a part of our regular meals, the morning, soon after we rise, is the most favorable. [Footnote:  I ought to remark, that as the morning is the best time for eating good fruit, so it is the very worst time for eating it if not good; and as a large proportion of that which is eaten is unripe, or otherwise bad, this may account for the general prejudice against eating it at this period.] My reasons are as follows: