There were several members of the party of foreigners of different degrees of prejudice against anything strange in appearance. To one, all of the comestibles were "utterly impossible," and remained so to the end; while to others curiosity got the better of suspicion, and finally the appetites looked forward to dinner-time with especial cordiality, for the rice-mountain relish-cordon and the complicated combination were digested with ease.
The standard dish, however, of the Javan dinner is boiled potatoes and beefsteak swimming in a pint of good butter gravy, so that even the conscientious dietist with vegetarian preferences may revel in something that smacks of home and mother, with such an abundance of luscious fruits that nothing but gustatory delight happens as a usual thing. Still, it is the same in Java or Japan, in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome or New York, the digestion of food is under the control of the head and therefore may be called head digestion.
PROFESSOR FISHER'S EXPERIMENT
The most important large experiment for the testing of head digestion under conditions of strict scientific control was that inaugurated and conducted by Professor Irving Fisher, of Yale University, in America.
Professor Fisher occupies the Chair of Political Economy at Yale, has made extensive researches into the factors that influence the economies or extravagances of living, and is President of the Committee of One Hundred of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Health.
Professor Fisher's interest in my revelations and tests relative to the potency of head digestion came primarily from a personal test which worked wonders for him in establishing a foundation for good health. He was not satisfied with the later Chittenden experiments, because they substituted academic prescription for natural selection in formulating the rules of the inquiry. Like myself, in conducting the original researches, Professor Fisher realised that the practical value of my discoveries was that no one needed a biological chemist to order his meals for him or tell his appetite what his body needed in the way of food elements.
Horace Fletcher in his Master of Arts Robes.
The Fisher experiment worked with nine healthy undergraduates who were ambitious to take high scholastic honours, and who had little time for athletics or any form of physical exercise, they being types of the average University undergraduate.