"During a part of the time of my principal experiment, I kept a grocery. On leaving this, I established a Graham boarding-house, in which I continued for one year.
"About a year after the termination of my experiment, I had occasion, for about three weeks, to work in a bake-house, where the mercury in the thermometer was at 90°. While here, I ate twelve ounces of dry bread and two apples a day, and drank nothing. Yet I perspired as freely as ever, nor did I perceive any difference in the quality or the quantity of any other secretions or excretions."
The reader will take notice that Mr. Robinson's principal or starvation experiment, lasted five months, or one hundred and fifty days. He will also observe that he left off the experiment with nearly or quite as much flesh as he had when he commenced, and with a very great increase of muscular strength.
The above statement was so remarkable, that not a few medical men and others regarded it as a hoax. "To live on three ounces of bread, and yet be in daily employment," they said, "even though such employment were of a kind likely to call for very little muscular effort, is altogether incredible. And what renders the whole so much more unlikely, is, the yet more extraordinary assertion, that, part of the time, he gained more in weight than the whole amount eaten and drank."
It was no wonder that medical and all scientific men were staggered at the account. I was in doubt myself, in regard to the functions of waste, and made a very rigid examination, in order to be certain of the facts, before I ventured to publish any thing. On one or two points, I afterward obtained Mr. Robinson's particular statement, as follows:—
"In regard to the question you propose, I shall have to guess a little. So far as the fluids are concerned, however, I think it was about half a pint a day. The solids—for I weighed them this morning, and they appear to me about equal to those voided during the experiment—are fully half a pound."
I also recently ascertained another curious fact. Mr. Robinson's eyesight, prior to the experiment, had, for many years, been very poor, but was perfectly restored during its progress. It appeared, also, that he had again resorted to the exclusive use of bread and water for food; but not in such small quantities as before. Mr. Robinson, of course, is now above sixty years old.
One medical correspondent of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, pressed Mr. Robinson, very hard, for corroborative testimony concerning the facts just stated, to which Mr. Robinson very kindly replied, by sending him the certificate of his wife, Mrs. E. D. Robinson, whose veracity is undoubted. The certificate was as follows:—
"The most of the facts which my husband has written, I well recollect, and will give my name as a voucher for the truth of them."
A brother of Mr. Robinson, at Holmes' Hole, whom I called on, appeared to give full credence to the statements of the latter, although he was much opposed to the experiment, at the time it was made, and mortally detested all his bread and water tendencies.