ely
to his size, a somewhat larger supply of nutriment. But, besides
repairing his body and maintaining its heat, the boy has to make new
tissue--to grow. After waste and thermal loss have been provided for,
such surplus of nutriment as remains goes to the further building up of
the frame; and only in virtue of this surplus is normal growth possible;
the growth that sometimes takes place in the absence of it, causing a
manifest prostration consequent upon defective repair. It is true that
because of a certain mechanical law which cannot be here explained, a
small organism has an advantage over a large one in the ratio between
the sustaining and destroying forces--an advantage, indeed, to which the
very possibility of growth is owing. But this admission only makes it
the more obvious that though much adverse treatment may be borne without
this excess of vitality being quite out-balanced; yet any adverse
treatment, by diminishing it, must diminish the size or structural
perfection reached. How peremptory is the demand of the unfolding
organism for materials, is seen alike in that "schoolboy hunger," which
after-life rarely parallels in intensity, and in the comparatively quick
return of appetite. And if there needs further evidence of this extra
necessity for nutriment, we have it in the fact that, during the famines
following shipwrecks and other disasters, the children are the first to
die.

This relatively greater need for nutriment being admitted, as it must
be, the question that remains is--shall we meet it by giving an
excessive quantity of what may be called dilute food, or a more moderate
quantity of concentrated food? The nutriment obtainable from a given
weight of meat is obtainable only from a larger weight of bread, or from
a still larger weight of potatoes, and so on. To fulfil the requirement,
the quantity must be increased as the nutritiveness is diminished.
Shall, we, then, respond to the extra wants of the growing child by
giving an adequate quantity of food as good as that of adults? Or,
regardless of the fact that its stomach has to dispose of a relatively
larger quantity even of this good food, shall we further tax it by
giving an inferior food in still greater quantity?

The answer is tolerably obvious. The more the labour of digestion is
economised, the more energy is left for the purposes of growth and
action. The functions of the stomach and intestines cannot be performed
without a large supply o