bles, pastry,
confectionery, nuts, raisins, wines, fruits, etc., into one of the most
delicately constructed organs of the body, and expect it to take care
of its miscellaneous and incongruous load without a murmur.

After all these abuses we do not give the blood a chance to go to the
stomach and help it out of its misery, but summon it to the brain and
muscles, notwithstanding the fact that it is so important to have an
extra supply to aid digestion that Nature has made the blood vessels of
the alimentary canal large enough to contain several times the amount
in the entire body.

Who ever saw a horse leave his oats and hay, when hungry, to wash them
down with water? The dumb beasts can teach us some valuable lessons in
eating and drinking. Nature mixes our gastric juice or pepsin and
acids in just the right proportion to digest our food, and keep it at
_exactly_ the right temperature. If we dilute it, or lower its
temperature by ice water, we diminish its solvent or digestive power,
and dyspepsia is the natural result.

English factory children have received the commiseration of the world
because they were scourged to work fourteen hours out of the
twenty-four. But there is many a theoretical republican who is a
harsher taskmaster to his stomach than this; who allows it no more
resting time than he does his watch; who gives it no Sunday, no
holiday, no vacation in any sense, and who seeks to make his heart beat
faster for the sake of the exhilaration he can thus produce.

Although the heart weighs a little over half a pound, yet it pumps
eighteen pounds of blood from itself, forcing it into every nook and
corner of the entire body, back to itself in less than two minutes.
This little organ, the most perfect engine in the world, does a daily
work equal to lifting one hundred and twenty-four tons one foot high,
and exerts one-third as much muscle power as does a stout man at hard
labor. If the heart should expend its entire force lifting its own
weight, it would raise itself nearly twenty thousand feet an hour, ten
times as high as a pedestrian can lift himself in ascending a mountain.
What folly, then, to goad this willing, hard-working slave to greater
exertions by stimulants!

We must pay the penalty of our vocations. Beware of work that kills
the workman. Those who prize long life should avoid all occupations
which compel them to breathe impure air or deleterious gases, and
especially those in which the