TABLE TOPICS.
The nervousness and peevishness of our times are chiefly attributable to tea and coffee. The digestive organs of confirmed coffee drinkers are in a state of chronic derangement which reacts on the brain, producing fretful and lachrymose moods. The snappish, petulant humor of the Chinese can certainly be ascribed to their immoderate fondness for tea.—Dr. Bock.
Dr. Ferguson, an eminent physician who has carefully investigated the influence of tea and coffee upon the health and development of children, says he found that children who were allowed these beverages gained but four pounds a year between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, while those who had been allowed milk instead, gained fifteen pounds in weight during the same period.
Dr. Richardson, the eminent English physician and scientist, asserts that the misery of the women of the poorer classes of the population in England is more than doubled by the use of tea, which only soothes or stimulates to intensify the after-coming depression and languor.
A physician recommended a lady to abandon the use of tea and coffee. "O, but I shall miss it so," said she.
"Very likely," replied her medical adviser, "but you are missing health now, and will soon lose it altogether if you do not."
Dr. Stenhouse, of Liverpool, once made a careful analysis of a sample package of black tea, which was found to contain "some pure Congo tea leaves, also siftings of Pekoe and inferior kinds, weighing together twenty-seven per cent of the whole. The remaining seventy-three per cent was composed of the following substances; Iron, plumbago, chalk, China-clay, sand, Prussian-blue, tumeric, indigo, starch, gypsum, catechu, gum, the leaves of the camelia, sarangna, Chlorantes officinalis, elm, oak, willow, poplar, elder, beach, hawthorn, and sloe."
