Usually the thing to guard against most carefully is gluttony, so far as boys are concerned.  With girls the tendency often is to eat far too little.  A false delicacy, a feeling that paleness and fragility are beautiful and feminine, inclines the young girl often to eat less than she desires; and the stomach accustoms itself to the insufficient supply, till the reception of a reasonable meal is an impossibility.  Or if they eat improper food (hot breads and much fat and sweets), the same result follows.  Digestion, or rather assimilation, is impossible; and pasty face and lusterless eyes become the rule.  A greedy woman is the exception; and yet all schoolgirls know the temptation to over-eating produced by a box of goodies from home, or the stronger temptation, after a school-term has ended, to ravage all cake-boxes and preserve-jars.  Then comes the pill or powder, and the habit of going to them for a relief which if no excess had been committed, would have been unnecessary.  Patent medicines are the natural sequence of unwholesome food, and both are outrages on common-sense.

We will take it for granted, then, that our baby has come to boyhood and youth in blissful ignorance of their names or natures.  But as we are not in the least certain what personal tastes he may have developed, or what form his life-work is to take,—­whether professional or mercantile or artisan in one of the many trades,—­we can now only give the regimen best adapted for each.

Supposing his tastes to be scholarly, and a college and professional career to be chosen, the time has come for slight changes in the system of diet,—­very slight, however.  It has become a popular saying among thinkers upon these questions, “Without phosphorus, no thinking;” and like all arbitrary utterances it has done more harm than good.  The amount of phosphorus passing through the system bears no relation whatever to the intensity of thought.  “A captive lion,” to quote from Dr. Chambers, one of the most distinguished living authorities on diet, “a leopard, or hare, which can have wonderfully little to think about, assimilates and parts with a greater quantity of phosphorus than a professor of chemistry working hard in his laboratory; while a beaver, who always seems to be contriving something, excretes so little phosphorus that chemical analysis cannot detect it.”

Phosphatic salts are demanded, but so are other salts, fat, and water; and the dietaries that order students to live upon fish, eggs, and oysters, because they are rich in phosphorus, without which the brain starves, err just so far as they make this the sole reason,—­the real reason being that these articles are all easily digested, and that the student, leading an inactive muscular life, does not require the heavy, hearty food of the laborer.