age of fifty-two he retired from business. A month later he had
an idea; and it so interfered with all his opinions, and so affected
his general health, that he died.

EDGAR J. SAXON.

A SIGNIFICANT CASE--II.

He stopped smoking tobacco on the second day, and does not mean to
resume its use. Of course he had no alcohol in any form during the
fast, but he never has taken much alcohol, although he was not a
pledged abstainer. The temperature was taken many times and seems to
have been almost always subnormal, about 97 degrees Fahr., but this is
not so unusual a condition as to call for comment. The chief cause of
a subnormal temperature, in my opinion, is blocking of the body with
too much food. No doubt in prolonged fasting the temperature may fall
also; but sometimes a fast will be the cause of raising a subnormal
bodily temperature, as happened in a case of mine in which on the
twenty-eighth day of the fast there was a large elimination of urates
by the kidneys and a rise of temperature from 96 degrees to 98.4
degrees. Subnormal bodily temperature has not received the attention
which it deserves. It is usually one of the forerunners, or prodromata
as they are called, of the onset of incurable diseases like cancer,
Bright's disease or apoplexy. The commonly accepted view that the heat
of the body depends upon the food, and that people eat blubber in the
Arctic and Antarctic regions to keep the bodily heat up, is one of the
chief causes for neglect of the study of subnormal temperature. And it
is quite surprising that physiologists have not thought it necessary
to explain why nature has provided sugar and palm oil and cocoa-nut
oil and ground-nut oil in the tropical regions, as well as abundance
of olive oil in the warm temperate regions of the earth if these foods
keep the bodily heat up. They ought to have been more abundantly
supplied in the Arctic and Antarctic regions if the accepted view is
correct. Besides, if we must eat blubber to keep bodily heat up in the
Arctic regions when the outside temperature is 50 or 100 or more
degrees lower than that of the body, what ought we to eat in the
tropics to keep bodily heat down when the outside temperature is 50 or
even 80 degrees above that of the body? Physiologists have not
explained this, although assuredly an explanation is wanted. But the
true explanation, the correct explanation, would have demolished the
doctrine that bodily heat is due to the food, and