may also be caused by over-feeding and may therefore require for proper treatment, not increase of the diet, but diminution of it.  A low temperature, therefore, a slow pulse, languor, pallor, inanition, fatigue, good-for-nothingness, inefficiency, anorexia, anaemia, neurasthenia, etc., etc., may all be due to blocking of the body with too much food as well as to supplying it with too little.  Fires may be put out by heaping up too much coal on them.  To make them burn briskly we ought to push the poker in and gently lift the coal so as to admit of the entrance of air.  Then in a while our fire will become brisk and bright.  And so it may be in the body.  Nay, my opinion is that almost always these marks of depression are caused by blocking up of the body and that therefore the proper treatment is, as a rule, not increase but diminution of the diet.  The place in the body in which the blocking first occurs is the connective tissues or the tissues that connect every part with every other.  It is here that the lymph is secreted, and as the lymph joins the thoracic duct which conveys the products of digestion to the blood, it is obvious that lymph-secretion is a complementary digestive process and it is also obvious how blocking up of the connective tissues, which is the immediate cause of anorexia and inanition, usually comes to exist in the body.

M.D. talks of “natural food.”  He seems to be a vegetarian?  Good.  But is not the question of how much food we ought to eat equally urgent whether we are vegetarian or omnivorous?  I think it is.  I do not think that the chief cause of our illnesses to-day is taking wrong or unsuitable food.  In my opinion we are ill mainly because we take suitable food too often and because we take too much of it.  My answer to the question, therefore—­“How Much Should We Eat?—­A Warning”—­turns on the previous question:  What is the Function performed by Food in the Body?  As I think that this function in the grown body is only to restore the waste, the warning in my mind is far rather that we should take less than that we should (as M.D. advises us) take more.  I agree with him in the view that “chronic starvation is insidious.”  But, as I believe that “chronic starvation” is usually a form of Dr King Chambers’s “starvation from over-repletion” and of Dr Dewey’s “starvation from over-feeding,” I am bound to be of the consequent opinion that it is to be met, not by increase, but by diminution of the diet.  This is one of my reasons for thinking that none of us ought ever to eat oftener than twice a day, under fifty years of age, and that after that we would do well to eat once a day only.  I feel sure that if we altered our habits in these ways, we should add very much both to the duration and to the efficiency of life.  This is not a question of dietetics only.  The issue is of the most practical character.  What an addition of five or ten or fifteen or twenty or twenty-five years to the average duration of life