ir bodies. Fearing to be Epicureans,
they become Spartans, as far as their feebler organizations will allow
them, and very successful Stoics, by the aid of Saxon will. By a faulty
logic, things which in excess are hurtful are denied a moderate use.
Habits innocent in themselves are to be cast aside, lest they induce
others which are injurious.

There is but little danger that Puritan antecedents and a New England
climate should tend to idle indulgence or Epicurean sloth. We think
there is a tendency to reform too far. We confess our preference for
the physique of Apollo to that of Hercules. We acknowledge an amiable
weakness for those bounties of Nature which soothe or comfort us or
renew our nervous energy, and which, we think, injure us no more than
our daily bread, if not immoderately used.

Science almost always finds some foundation in fact for popular
prejudices. For years, men have continued wasting their substance on
coffee and tea, insisting that they strengthened as well as comforted
them, in spite of the warnings of the sanitarian, who looked on them
solely as stimulants or sedatives, and of the economist, who bewailed
their extravagant cost.

Physiology, relying on organic chemistry, has at least justified by
experiment the choice of the civilized world. Coffee and tea had been
regarded by the physiologist and the physician as stimulants of the
nervous system, and to a less extent and secondarily of the
circulation, and that was all. To fulfil this object, and to answer the
endless craving for habitual excitants of the cerebral functions, they
had been admitted reluctantly to the diet of their patients, rather as
necessary evils than as positive goods. It was reserved for the
all-searching German mind to discover their better qualities; and it is
only within the last five years, that the self-sacrificing experiments
of Dr. Boecker of Bonn, and of Dr. Julius Lehmann, have raised them to
their proper place in dietetics, as "Accessory Foods." This term, which
we borrow from the remarkable work on "Digestion and its Derangements,"
by Dr. Thomas K. Chambers, of London, is only the slightest of the many
obligations which we hasten to acknowledge ourselves under to this
author, as will appear from citations in the course of this article.

The labors of earlier physiologists and chemists, as Carpenter, Liebig,
and Paget, had resulted in the classification of nutritive substances
under different heads, according