There is this to be said about fruits, that all those containing acids decompose the gastric juice, as they all contain potash salts in union with fruit acids. As soon as they reach the stomach the free hydrochloric acid of the gastric juice unites with the potash, setting the fruit acid free to irritate the stomach. There is never any desire for acid fruits through real hunger, especially those of the hyperacid kinds: they are simply taken to gratify that lower sense—relish.
The tropical fruits are without acids, and therefore are well adapted to a class of people who have only the least use for muscle and brains. Acid fruits can only be taken with apparent impunity by the young and old, who can generate gastric juice copiously. Because of the general impression that they are healthful and no tax, human stomachs are converted into cider-mills at will, regardless of between meal-times. By their ravishing flavor and apparent ease of digestion apples still play an important part in the "fall of man" from that higher estate, the Eden without its dyspepsia.
What shall we eat? The fig-leaved savage under his bread-fruit tree, the fur-clad Eskimo in his ice-hut, need not be asked: the needed food is in all due supply with little cost of muscle and less of mind—and he has no mental condition that can disturb the digestion.
The simpler waste-restoring foods have a flavor of their own that needs little reinforcement if developed by due mastication and with adequate hunger. In my own case butter duly salted seems to be my only natural appetizer aside from hunger; and yet I must own that at times new honey has a wonderful effect on the mouth-glands.
The difference between eating from hunger and mere relish, as fruits and the various sweetened foods are eaten, is a new study in dietetics, and one more important can scarcely be conceived. It can hardly be intelligently studied without taking into due account this new physiology. With rarest exceptions the need of food is estimated by the mere pleasure that comes from relish—that kind of relish that is evolved from the pies, puddings, ice creams, the last course in Sunday dinners, never taken until the limits of stomach expansion are nearly reached.
X.
Some of the external evidences of that general regeneration which comes through Nature will now be given. We will study the human face as we study the earth when the favoring conditions of Spring rouse all Nature to newness of life. The face shall be our human landscape.
I select a face in which the eyes are dull from debility, in which there is no sparkle of soul, and beneath are the dark venus-hanging clouds. The face has a dull, lifeless cast; the veins are all enlarged from debility, and cover the larger arteries as with a mourner's pall, save where there are patches as of clouds on fire, where disease of the skin enlivens the drear landscape. There are pimples large and small, some with overflowing volcanoes; there are no lines of expression: these are changed to lines of morbid anatomy. We listen, and there are no echoes of departed joys; look as we will, and we see no evidence of the existence of a soul.
The ultimate of this picture is death from unrecognized suicide; death, a slow dying to every sense that made life worth living. There is this about these deaths that go on through the months and years: they exaggerate the worst instincts of the soul as it is dragged down—down through brain-wasting largely avoidable if only understood.