died, ignorant of
what produced their disease. The law, in the first place, rigidly
enforced the marketing of clean and perfect fruit, and a wholesome
quality of all other provisions. This was at first difficult to do, as
in those ancient days, (I refer to a very remote period of our history)
in order to make usurious profit, dealers adulterated all kinds of food;
often with poisonous substances. When every state took charge of its
markets and provided free schools for cooking, progress took a rapid
advance. Do you wonder at it? Reflect then. How could I force my mind
into complete absorption of some new combination of chemicals, while the
gastric juice in my stomach was battling with sour or adulterated food?
Nature would compel me to pay some attention to the discomfort of my
digestive organs, and it might happen at a time when I was on the verge
of a revelation in science, which might be lost. You may think it an
insignificant matter to speak of in connection with the grand
enlightenment that we possess; but Nature herself is a mass of little
things. Our bodies, strong and supple as they are, are nothing but a
union of tiny cells. It is by the investigation of little things that we
have reached the great ones."

I felt a keen desire to know more about their progress toward universal
health, feeling assured that the history of the extirpation of disease
must be curious and instructive. I had been previously made acquainted
with the fact that disease was really unknown to them, save in its
historical existence. To cull this isolated history from their vast
libraries of past events, would require a great deal of patient and
laborious research, and the necessary reading of a great deal of matter
that I could not be interested in, and that could not beside be of any
real value to me, so I requested the Preceptress to give me an
epitomized history of it in her own language, merely relating such facts
as might be useful to me, and that I could comprehend, for I may as well
bring forward the fact that, in comparison to theirs, my mind was as a
savages would be to our civilization.

Their brain was of a finer intellectual fiber. It possessed a wider,
grander, more majestic receptivity. They absorbed ideas that passed over
me like a cloud. Their imaginations were etherealized. They reached into
what appeared to be materialless space, and brought from it substances I
had never heard of before, and by processes I could not com