foods without any inconvenience.  Fruit is more likely to disagree when taken in conjunction with elaborately cooked foods.  Many cannot take fruit, especially if it be acid, at the same time as cereal or starchy substances, and the difficulty is said to be greater at the morning’s meal.  If the indigestion produced is due to the acid of the fruit preventing the saliva acting on the starch, scientific principles would direct that the fruit be eaten quite towards the end of the meal.  The same consideration condemns the use of mint sauce, cucumber and vinegar, or pickles, with potatoes and bread, or even mint sauce with green peas.  Bananas are an exception, as not interfering with the digestion of starch.  Bananas are generally eaten in an unripe condition, white and somewhat mealy; they should be kept until the starch has been converted into sugar, when they are both more pleasant and wholesome.  Nuts and fruit go well together.  For a portable meal, stoned raisins or other dried fruit and walnut kernels or other nuts are excellent.

What has been called a defect in most fruits, is the fact that the proteid is small in proportion to the other constituents.  This has been too much dwelt upon, owing to the prevailing exaggerated idea of the quantity of proteid required.  The tomato contains a large proportion, though the water is very high.  Bananas, grapes and strawberries contain to each part of proteid from 10 to 12 parts of other solid nutritive constituents (any oil being calculated into starch equivalents); this is termed the nutritive ratio.  Although this may seem a small proportion of proteid, there are reasons for believing that it is sufficient.  Taking the average of 29 analyses of American apples, a nutritive ratio of 33 was obtained.  If it were suggested that life should be sustained on apples alone, this small quantity of proteid would be an insurmountable difficulty.  As the addition of nuts or other nutritious food sufficiently increases the proteid, no objection can with justice be made against the use of fruit.  A study of our teeth, digestive organs and general structure, and of comparative anatomy, points to fruits, nuts and succulent vegetables as our original diet.

The potash and other salts of the organic acids in fruits tend to keep the blood properly alkaline.  Where there is a tendency to the deposition of uric acid in the body, they hinder its formation.  Citric, tartaric, malic and other organic acids exist in fruits in combination with potash and other bases, as well as in the free state.  The free acids in fruits, when eaten, combine with the alkalies in the intestinal tract, and are absorbed by the body and pass into the blood, not as acids, but as neutral salts.  Here they are converted into potassium carbonate or some other carbonate.  Fruit acids never make the blood acid but the reverse.  Fruit salts and acids are antiscorbutic.  Fruits have often proved of the greatest benefit in illness.  What is known