mistake did I put myself in the hands of any
one on the list. I thanked him and departed from his presence. To the
casual eye I may have seemed, going away, to be in high spirits; but,
confidentially, I wasn't feeling so very brash. My spirits were low. I had
heard the truth--I made no effort to deceive myself there--but the truth
was painful.

Still, knowing what I should do, I hesitated, temporizing with myself. I
gave a couple of days of intensive meditation to the subject, and then I
reached this conclusion: I would read a few standard and orthodox works
on dietetics, and, so doing, try to arrive at least at a superficial
knowledge of the matter. Also, I would balance what one recognized
authority said as against what another recognized authority said, and
then, before going to a specialist, I would do a little personal
experimenting with my diet and mark the effects.

I arrived at this decision privately, taking no one into my confidence.
And without an intent to deprive any hard-worked specialist of a
prospective fee, I shall ever continue to believe that the second part of
the course I chose to follow was a wise one. It might not serve my
brother-in-obesity, but it served me well. I'm sure of that.

But the first part of the system naturally came first. This had to do with
research work among the best authorities. Here I struck one of the snags
that rise in the pathway of the hardy soul who goes adventuring into any
given department of the science of medicine and its allied sciences. I was
pained to observe how rare it was for two experts, of whatsoever period,
to agree upon a single essential element. An amateur investigator was left
at a loss to fathom why such entirely opposite conclusions should have
been arrived at by the members of the same school when presumably both had
had the same raw materials to work on. By their raw materials I mean their
patients. But so it was.

The ancient apostles of dietetics, the original pathfinders into a
hitherto untracked field, had disciples who set out to follow in their
footsteps, but before they had traveled very far along the alimentary
trail the disciples were quarreling bitterly with the masters' deductions
and conclusions. To-day's school was snooty touching on the major opinions
of yesterday's crowd, and to-morrow's crowd already made faces at
to-day's.

On just two points I found a unanimity of opinion among what might be
termed the middle group of dietetic