A mild purge may be taken once a week with advantage.  Glauber’s Salts (Sodium Sulphate), Cascara Sagrada, and liquid paraffin are all good, while Castor Oil Globules are suited for children.

For flatulence, take a 10-minim capsule of Terebine after meals, or charcoal, either as French Rusks ("Biscols Fraudin”) or a teaspoonful of powdered charcoal between meals.  One drop of creosote on a lump of sugar, peppermint water, and sal volatile may also be used.  Sufferers should toast bread, and use sugar sparingly.

Patent medicines almost invariably contain a brisk aperient.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XV

GENERAL HYGIENE

“Better to hunt in fields for health unbought,
Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.” 
—­Dryden.

If men but realized what complicated machines they were, they would use themselves better.  In the body are 240 bones and hundreds of muscles.  The heart, no bigger than the clenched fist, beats 100,000 times a day; the aerating surface of the lungs is equal in area to the floors of a six-roomed house, and by means of its minute blood-vessels which would stretch across the Atlantic, 500 gallons of blood are brought into contact with over 3,000 gallons of air every day.

Seven million sweat-glands, 30 miles long, get rid of a pint of liquid and an ounce of solid waste each day while it takes a tube 30 feet long, with millions of glands, to deal with a sip of milk.

Man’s finest steam engine turns one-eighth of the energy supplied into work; nature’s engine, muscle, turns one-third into work.  The body contains 9 gallons of water, enough carbon to make 9,000 lead pencils, phosphorus for 8,000 boxes of matches, iron for 5 tacks, and salt enough to fill half a dozen salt-cellars.

Over 40 food-ferments have been found in the liver; there are 5,000,000 red and 30,000 white blood corpuscles in a space as big as a pin’s head, each one of which travels a mile a day and lives but a fortnight, millions of new ones being built up in the bone-marrow every second; a flash of light lasting only one eight-millionth of a second, will stimulate the eye, which can discriminate half a million tints.  The ear can distinguish 11,000 tones, and is so sensitive that we hear waves of air less than one sixty-thousandth of an inch long; a mass of almost liquid jelly—­for 81 per cent of the brain is water, and Aristotle thought it was a wet sponge to cool the hot heart—­sends out impulses ordering our every thought and act, and stores up memory, we know not how or where.

There are 10,000,000,000 of cells in the brain cortex alone, and 560,000 fibres pass from the brain down the spinal cord.

A clear, watery cell, no larger than the dot on an “i” encloses factors causing genius or stupidity, honesty or roguery, pride or humility, patience or impulsiveness, coldness or ardour, tallness or shortness, form of head or hands, colour of eyes and hair, male or female sex, and the thousand details that make a man.