The investigation now in progress at Yale University, under the direction of Professor Chittenden and under the fostering auspices of the Trustees of the Bache Fund, which is administered by the National Academy of Sciences, and other contributed support, is a Militant-Scientific campaign which will not cease until we know as much about human nutrition, at least, as we know about the nutrition of our domestic animals.
In this little book, however, is an account of the first distress and war cry, (to appropriate an expression of the Salvation Army), and while the workers in Science may take a considerable time to make observations and investigate the "reasons for things," the underlying claims herein stated will, it is believed, ultimately be established as fundamental facts of both Hygiene and Physiology.
The psychic factor in digestion is even more important than originally claimed by the author, and fully accounts for the strength attained by the Christian Science movement.
In the "A.B.-Z. of Our Own Nutrition" are reprinted, for recent scientific reports, in addition to the papers of Dr. Van Someren and Professor Chittenden, before mentioned, articles and lectures by Dr. Professor Pawlow, the great Russian physiologist and one of the Board of Assessors in the International Nutrition Investigation, described in the "A.B.-Z.," (reprinted from the fine English Translation by Dr. W. H. Thompson, of Trinity College, Dublin; English publishers, Griffin & Co.; American publishers, Lippincott & Co.), on the mental influence over the salivary, gastric, and intestinal secretions. Also, nearly an hundred pages of most virile, readable, and important "Observations on Mastication," by Dr. Harry Campbell, M.D., F.R.C.P., of the North-west London Hospital; reprinted by courteous permission of the author and of the editor of the Lancet. Also, a description of the digestive process in animals as seen by aid of the Röntgen, or X-Ray; a most readable account of the infinite patience and application of Dr. W. B. Cannon, of the Harvard Medical School, devoted to learning the "reasons for things" done in the closed and secret laboratory of the stomach and intestines.
The above is a necessary advertisement of another volume in the A.B.C. Life Series; because the details of this particular attempt to reduce the philosophy of every-day life to profitable simples is linked-up in several volumes developed in the course of study of the subject for location of the germinal causes.
"Menticulture" was the first of the series and relates to the individual. "Happiness" came next and located the chief enemy of happiness in Fearthought, the unprofitable element of forethought. "That Last Waif" treated the question as related to the Social Whole, children in particular, and recommended Social Quarantine; by extension of infant education to the extreme of allowing no child to escape educational care. This present treatise deals with the first requirement of such infantile care and education, right feeding.
DR. KELLOGG'S APPRECIATION
The great Battle Creek Sanitarium, under the inspiration and direction of Dr. J. H. Kellogg, has grown to enormous proportions in thirty-seven years. It began with one patient in a two-storey frame house in a country village, and has been largely influential in creating the present proud distinction of Battle Creek, Michigan, with its millions upon millions of invested industrial capital.
The "cure" is based upon the establishment in the patient of right nutrition, right functioning of the bodily organs and secretions, and thereby assisting Nature to perform the cure in a natural manner. Pure foods and other conditions of right nutrition have been the particular study of the institution staff, and large and finely furnished chemical and bacteriological laboratories have been installed for the study of nutrition in a scientific manner.