s nervousness may arise from this
cause, as it is probable that our wide-spread dyspepsia begins in the
use of badly-cooked solid food, immediately on the completion of the
first dentition.

All over this country we drink coffee and tea, morning and night; at
least, the majority of us do. They are expensive; their palpable
results to the senses are fleeting; they are reported innutritious;
nay, far worse, they are decried as positively unwholesome. Yet we
still use them, and no one has succeeded in leading a crusade against
them at all comparable with the onslaughts on other stimulants, made in
these temperance days. The fair sex raises its voice against tobacco
and other masculine sedatives, but clings pertinaciously to this
delusion.

It becomes, then, an important question to decide whether the choice of
civilization is justified by experience or science,--and whether some
effect on the animal economy, ulterior to a merely soothing or
stimulant action, can be found to sanction the use of coffee and tea.
And this is a question in so far differing from that of other
stimulants, that it is not to be discussed with the moralist, but
solely with the economist and the sanitarian.

More even than us, economically, does it concern the overcrowded and
limited states of Europe, where labor is cheap, and the necessaries of
life absorb all the efforts, to decide whether so much of the earnings
of the poor is annually thrown away in idle stimulation.

It concerns us in a sanitary point of view, more than in any other way,
and more than any other people. We are rich, spare in habit, and of
untiring industry. We can afford luxurious indulgences, we are very
susceptible to nervous stimuli, and we overwork.

Our national habit is feeble. Debility is recognized as the prevailing
type of our diseases. Nervous exhaustion is met by recourse to all
kinds of stimulation. We are apt to think coffee and tea as harmless,
or rather as slow in their deleterious action, as any. Are they nothing
more?

As debility marks the degeneration of our physical constitution, so
does a morbid sensitiveness at all earthly indulgence, a tendency to
reform things innocent, although useless, betray the weakness of the
moral health of our day. An ascetic spirit is abroad; our amateur
physiologists look rather to a mortification than an honest building-up
of the flesh. They prefer naked muscle to rounded outline, and seek
rather to test than to enjoy the