vegetable foods, especially if uncooked.  In process of time, not only flesh but vegetable foods, were more and more subjected to cooking and seasoning, or mixed with the flesh, blood or viscera of the animals killed.  Next, food was manufactured to produce a still greater variety, to increase the flavour, or less frequently to produce an imagined greater digestibility or nutritiveness.  Man has taken that which seemed most agreeable, rarely has he been intentionally guided by scientific principles, by that which is really best.  Only of late years can it be said that there is such a thing as a science of dietetics; although cookery books innumerable have abounded.  Of recent years many diseases have enormously increased, some even seem to be new.  Digestive disturbances, dental caries, appendicitis, gout, rheumatism, diabetes, nervous complaints, heart disease, baldness and a host of other diseases are due, in a great measure, to abuse of food.  One of the most learned and original of scientific men, Professor Elie Metchnikoff, in his remarkable book on “The Nature of Man,” referring to the variety of food and its complexity of preparation says that it “militates against physiological old age and that the simpler food of the uncivilised races is better....  Most of the complicated dishes provided in the homes, hotels and restaurants of the rich, stimulate the organs of digestion and secretion in a harmful way.  It would be true progress to abandon modern cuisine and to go back to the simpler dishes of our ancestors.”  A few have lived to a hundred years, and physiologists, including Metchnikoff, see no inherent reason why all men, apart from accident, should not do so.  Most men are old at 70, some even at 60; if we could add 20 or 30 years to our lives, what an immense gain it would be.  Instead of a man being in his prime, a useful member of the community, from about 25 to 60 or perhaps to 70; he would have the same physical and mental vigour to 80 or 90 or even longer.  This later period would be the most valuable part of his life, as he would be using and adding to the accumulated experience and knowledge of the earlier period.

Some, perceiving the mischief wrought by luxurious habits, urge us to go back to nature, to eat natural food.  This is ambiguous.  To speak of animals as being in a state of nature, conveys the distinct idea of their living according to their own instinct and reason, uninterfered with, in any way, by man.  The phrase, applied to man, is either meaningless, or has a meaning varying with the views of each speaker.  If it has any definite meaning, it must surely be the giving way to the animal impulses and instincts; to cast off all the artifices of civilisation, to give up all that the arts and sciences have done for man, all that he has acquired with enormous labour, through countless failures and successes, during hundreds of thousands of years, and to fall back to the lowest savagery—­even the savages known to us use