t from the first
wink in the morning to the last at night there is a gradual decline of
strength no matter how much food is taken, nor how ample the powers of
digestion; and that there comes a time with all when they must go to
bed, and not to the dining-room, to recover lost strength. The loss of a
night of sleep is never made up by any kind of care in eating on the
following day, and none are so stupid as not to know that rest is the
only means to recover from the exhaustion of excessive physical
activity.

The brain is not only a self-feeding organ when necessary, but it is
also a self-charging dynamo, regaining its exhausted energies entirely
through rest and sleep. There is no movement so light, no thought or
motion so trivial, that it does not cost brain power in its action--and
this is true of even the slightest exercise of energy evolved in
digestion.

Why, then, do we eat?

For two reasons, or perhaps three: we eat because we are hungry. We
rarely fail to eat excessively to satisfy the sense of relish after the
normal hunger sense has been dissipated; we may eat to satisfy relish as
we eat ice cream, fruits, and the enticing extras that beguile us to put
more food into the stomach after it is already overfilled for its
working capacity. But our actual need of food, the best reason for
taking it, is to make up for the wastes from the general activities; and
this is a process in the order of Nature that actually tires the entire
brain system, or, in the common phrase, the whole body, unless the
stomach has powers not derived from the brain system.

Now as we need not, cannot feed the brain in time of sickness, what can
we feed? In all diseases in which there are a high pulse and
temperature, pain or discomfort, aversion to food, a foul, dry mouth and
tongue, thirst, etc., wasting of the body goes on, no matter what the
feeding, until a clean, moist tongue and mouth and hunger mark the close
of the disease, when food can be taken with relish and digested. This
makes it clearly evident that we cannot save the muscles and fat by
feeding under these adverse conditions.

Another very important, unquestioned fact is that disease in proportion
to its severity means a loss of digestive conditions and of digestive
power.

Cheer is to digestion what the breeze is to the fire. It may well be
conceived that there are electric nerve wires extending from the depths
of the soul itself to each individual gland of the sto