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Show Fruit or Meat. The food which ii most enjoyed Is tba food we call bread and fruit. In all my Ions medical career, extending over forty years, I have rarely known an instance in-stance in which a child has not preferred fruit to animal food. 1 havo many time been called upon to treat children for stomachic disorders induced by pressing upon them animal to tlio exelunion 'of fruit diet, and havo seen tho best results occur from the practice of reverting to tlie use of fruit in the dietary. 1 say it without the least prejudice as a lesson learned frcm simple experience, that the most natural diet for tho young, after the natural milk diet. Is fruit and whelo meal bread, with milk and water for drink. The desire for this Bame mode of sustenance suste-nance is often continued into after years, as if the resort to flesh were a forced and artificial feeding, which required long and persistent habit to establibh its permanency as a part of the system of every day life. Mow strongly this preference prefer-ence taste for fruit over animal food prevails pre-vails is shown by the simple fact of tho retention of those foods in the moutlu Fruit is retained to be tasU'd and relished. relish-ed. Animal food, to use a common phrase, is "bolted." There fs a natural desire to retain thodelicious fruit for full mastication: there is no such desire, except ex-cept in the trained gourmand, for the retention re-tention of animal substance. One further fact which 1 have observed and that too often to discard it, as a fact of great moment is that when a person of mature ma-ture yearn lias, for u time, given up voluntarily vol-untarily the uso of animal food in favor of vegetable, the Bense of repugnance to animal food Is soon so markedly devel-1 devel-1 oped that a return to it is overcome with the utmost difficulty. Neither is this a mere fnncy or fad peculiar pe-culiar to sensitive men or over sentimental senti-mental women. I have been surprised to see it manifested in men who were the very reverse of sentimental, aud who were, in fact, quite ashamed to admit themselves guilty of any such weakness. I have heard thoso who, gone over from a mixed diet of animal and vegetable food to a pure vegetable diet, tqieak of feeling low under the new system, and declare that they must needs givo it up in consequence; but 1 have found even these (without exception) decluro that they infinitely preferred the simpler, purer, and, oh it seemed to them, more natural, food plucked from the prime source of food untainted by its passage through another animal body, Richardson Richard-son in Longman's Magazine. |