Diminishing energy and power, decreasing endurance, slowing circulation, lessening blood colour, falling temperature, altered blood pressure, enlarging heart and liver, are some of the most obvious signs with which the physician is brought into contact in such cases.  But every one of these may, and very often does, pass unnoticed for quite a long time by those who have had no scientific training.  The public are extremely ignorant on such matters because the natural sciences have been more neglected in this country in the last fifty years than anywhere else in Europe, and that is saying a good deal.  Hence diet quacks and all those who trade on the ignorance and prejudices of the public are having a good time and often employ it in writing the most appalling rubbish in reference to the important subject of nutrition.

Being themselves ignorant and without having studied physiology, even in its rudiments, they do not appear to consider that they should at least abstain from teaching others till they have got something certain for themselves.

If the public were less ignorant they would soon see through their pretensions; but, as it is, things go from bad to worse, and it is not too much to say that hundreds of lives have been lost down this sordid by-path of human avarice.

On one single day a few weeks ago the writer heard of three men, two of whom had been so seriously ill that their lives were in danger, and one of whom had died.  The certified cause of death in this case might not have led the uninitiated to suspect chronic starvation, but those who were behind the scenes knew that this was its real cause.  A further extraordinary fact was that two out of these three men were members of the medical profession, whose training in physiology ought, one would have thought, to have saved them from such errors.

The conclusion seems to be that they did not use their knowledge because at first they had no suspicion of the real cause of their illness.  In other words, chronic starvation is insidious and, if no accurate scientific measurements are made, its results, being attributed to other causes, are often allowed to become serious before they are properly treated.

These three men went wrong by following a layman quite destitute of physiological training, who appeared to have produced some wonderful results in himself and others on extraordinarily small quantities of food.

If the above tests had been made at once by a trained hand the error involved in such results could not have escaped detection, and none of these men would have endangered their lives.  I myself examined the layman in question and finding him not up to standard refused to follow him.  The writer has no difficulty in recalling at least a dozen cases similar to those above mentioned which have been under