AFTER all, is it not a mere juggling with dietetic principles for a physician to . attempt to prescribe a rational diet unless he takes into due account the mode of living and the type of food indulged in by his patient, previous to the decline. For every organized being is brought to this world with an equipment of vital reserve forces - a constitutional emergency fund, so to speak - intended to cover up recurrent deficiencies arising in the system from accidents and general adverse conditions. As long as these reserves are intact they continue to cover up the offences which the individual, in the course of his indulgences, commits against his own nature, enabling him for a longer or shorter time to mask the symptoms of interior functional disorder. But when in the course of time these reserves become exhausted, and powerless even to render ternporary adjustment, the system finds itself in the condition of a vessel, full to the brim, where every drop added to its contents means overflow. To recognize this emergency and keep the patient off such foodstuffs as have caused the excess - no matter how natural and valuable these foods otherwise may be in themselves - is one of the fine points of diagnosis, which our diet-experts and health-food specialists, in their generalizing enthusiasm, so often overlook. A diseased system means a broken physiological balance due to an excess of certain food elements by which the industry of the body finds itself glutted; and the first and only successful, step to take, is to decrease the foods of excess, and increase the foods neglected - whether they be starches or acids or "mucous-free."

In view of these conditions it is self-evident that there can be no general, cut-and-dried system of diet, prepared to cover every type of digestive infirmity. The dogmatic adherence to a certain dietetic rule, because of the fact that it has proved successful to its author and perhaps to some of his patients, is as illogical and unscientific as to advise the same kind of clothes for different seasons and altitudes, or the same mode of occupation for every mind. Hence while the passive minds and placid bodies of the Hindu can subsist and thrive on a flesh-free diet, the highly organized and often overstrung minds of the intellectuals of the Anglo-Saxon type of mind, have proven by unmistakable results the insufficiency of an exclusive fruit and vegetable diet, to sustain the high-tensioned strain of the deductive processes of modern constructive thought. Hence it was not a mere caprice or idiosyncrasy of Herbert Spencer, when after a series of determined efforts to maintain his literary labors on a vegetarian diet, finally was compelled, by sheer biological reasons, to return to a modified, animal diet. In his autobiography, where he refers to this experiment, he even mentions the recognition of a difficulty of concise, concentrated thinking, while on his vegetarian diet, and that several treatises, produced at that period, had to be reconstructed in the light of the recurring powers of a sharper logic, broader scope and keener analysis of thought, which came to him on his return to the more stimulating and yet non-irritating meat-diet. The same experiences have been recorded by other strong in-tellectuals like Gladstone, Edison, Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Luther Burbank, and scores of others; while on the other hand minds like William Jennings Bryan, Bernard Shaw, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and a large number of metaphysical devotees, mental healers, people of emotional and impulsive temperament, governed by high ideals, and determined to force their way to greatest height of mental powers, but in their soaring ambitions fail to recognize the power of biologic and physiologic handicaps. This often means that the foundations of concrete, practical safeguards in the modes of living have to be dispensed with. Yet this ambition has a great evolutionary value, as it introduces a sifting process by which the chaff of an unreasoning, overwrought emotionalism is eliminated from the great sweeping ascent of a vitally and mentally balanced individualized evolution. Mental balance has its guaranties in physical balance, and this again can only be sustained on a basis of dietetic balance. Hence the large number of biological irreconcilables - extremists in diet: "fruitarians," raw or "unfired food-eaters," "vegetarians," "mono-dietari-ans," and a constantly increasing host of unique and fanciful food specialists, prompted by the dream-ideal of attaining some vague, physical immortality without establishing the nervous and mental balance required to reach it. They belong to that class of egos who think they can conquer life by a trick of diet, and attempt to coerce the evolution of their physical nature into achievements beyond the very possibilities of their elemental makeup. This of course does not mean that we should neglect the evolution of our physical bodies in their development towards ideal heights; but rather to consider that as an instrument in the service of man, the body occupies the same position to the individual as a musical instrument to the artist; that while there will be continued opportunities for the improvement of the instrument as such, its existence will always be subject to the laws of its own elemental and constitutional makeup, and destined to perish in the very changes that spring from the basis of its phenomenon. Thus while we cheerfully agree with the great Oxford savant, Professor Huxley, that the future belongs to the vegetarians, we may yet be compelled by an invalidated or undeveloped health-condition to take recourse to the expediency of animal diet. For in the order of evolution the flesh-diet precedes the vegetable and grain diet, just as the latter precedes the introduction of fruit as an element in the human dietary. Hence as a means of restoring failing physical energy we are often compelled to return to primitive stages of life, and associate the weakened organism with sources of the easier obtainable virility and vital magnetism contained in the animal itself. For it is generally conceded by dietitians that an enfeebled digestive system can obtain an adequate sustenance with far less exertion from the ready-made, vitally polarized animal flesh, than from the securely encapsulated slowly dissolving cellulose of the grain and vegetable. The same diet which increases the strength of the healthy individual may prove to be a source of weakness and breakdown to a diseased and impoverished one.