beautiful and feminine, inclines the young girl often to eat less than she
desires; and the stomach accustoms itself to the insufficient supply, till
the reception of a reasonable meal is an impossibility. Or if they eat
improper food (hot breads and much fat and sweets), the same result
follows. Digestion, or rather assimilation, is impossible; and pasty face
and lusterless eyes become the rule. A greedy woman is the exception; and
yet all schoolgirls know the temptation to over-eating produced by a box
of goodies from home, or the stronger temptation, after a school-term has
ended, to ravage all cake-boxes and preserve-jars. Then comes the pill or
powder, and the habit of going to them for a relief which if no excess had
been committed, would have been unnecessary. Patent medicines are the
natural sequence of unwholesome food, and both are outrages on
common-sense.

We will take it for granted, then, that our baby has come to boyhood and
youth in blissful ignorance of their names or natures. But as we are not
in the least certain what personal tastes he may have developed, or what
form his life-work is to take,--whether professional or mercantile or
artisan in one of the many trades,--we can now only give the regimen best
adapted for each.

Supposing his tastes to be scholarly, and a college and professional
career to be chosen, the time has come for slight changes in the system of
diet,--very slight, however. It has become a popular saying among thinkers
upon these questions, "Without phosphorus, no thinking;" and like all
arbitrary utterances it has done more harm than good. The amount of
phosphorus passing through the system bears no relation whatever to the
intensity of thought. "A captive lion," to quote from Dr. Chambers, one of
the most distinguished living authorities on diet, "a leopard, or hare,
which can have wonderfully little to think about, assimilates and parts
with a greater quantity of phosphorus than a professor of chemistry
working hard in his laboratory; while a beaver, who always seems to be
contriving something, excretes so little phosphorus that chemical analysis
cannot detect it."

Phosphatic salts are demanded, but so are other salts, fat, and water;
and the dietaries that order students to live upon fish, eggs, and
oysters, because they are rich in phosphorus, without which the brain
starves, err just so far as they make this the sole reason,--the real
reason being that these articles are