Goldsmith.
“Whose son art thou?” inquired King Lane, in wonder, when the stripling David came into his presence after slaying the huge Goliath of Gath. “Whose daughter art thou?” asked the equally astonished barons, bishops, priests, and princes, of Joan of Arc, who, as De Quincey puts it, “had come out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious inspiration rooted in deep pastoral solitudes, to a station in the van of armies and to the more perilous station at the right hand of kings.”
Whose son—whose daughter—art thou? Is your strength of body, or mind, or purpose, chiefly derived from your ancestry?—or are you, in the main, the child of your individual physical, mental, and spiritual rules of life,—of your own aims, training, regimen, and deeds?
If the latter, one almost unconsciously wonders with the poet: “Upon what does this, our Caesar, feed, that he has grown so great?”—or what is lacking in his diet or his mentality that he remains so feeble in body, mind or soul?
An authority who has made a study of bee culture says that as soon as a hive needs a new queen the bees begin to feed the larvae of a few workers with the best part of a jelly-like substance called by bee cultivators the royal jelly. The one selected from the developed larvae for a queen continues to be fed upon this substance, while the others, of course, are no longer thus favored. As a result of her special diet the future queen grows several times as large as her companions and many times more intelligent.
Numerous experiments made upon animals and birds with different kinds of food have resulted in radical changes in their structure and appearance. In the case of birds very great changes were made in their plumage. The disposition and the tissues themselves were materially altered, coarsened or refined, according to the nature of the food.
We all know what a difference there is in the appearance, in the spirit and bearing of the fine high-stepping horses of the rich, which are fed with the greatest care, on the best foods, and those of the horses of poor people which are fed upon the meanest kind of hay, perhaps without any grain. Plants which have plenty of sunlight and nourishing soil have two or three times as much growth in a year as those whose roots are dwarfed in poor soil and whose leaves get little or no sunshine. Contrast the appearance of well-nourished crops with those that have had no fertilizer and have been grown on poor, arid soil.
There is just as great difference in the physical appearance of prosperous, well-fed men and women and of those who are underfed and under-nourished in the ranks of the poor as there is in the appearance of the high-stepping, well-fed and well-cared-for horses of the rich and the “dopey,” stupid, half-fed and half-cared-for horses of the poor; just as marked a difference in the quality and strength of the children reared in homes of wealth and luxury and those brought up in city slums as there is in the quality and strength of the plants raised from nourishing soil in the sunlight and those that have struggled up in poor soil, largely deprived of sun and dew.
The appearance and quality of plants and animals are alike dependent on the nutriment they receive. Sunshine, light, air, water, and the right kind and quantity of food are necessary for the perfect development of all.
Ignorance of food values and bodily requirements would reduce a Webster to a pygmy. It is just as necessary to know how to choose our foods and to know their action upon the body as it is to be trained for our vocations.
In repairing our homes and keeping them in order, we use materials like those that first entered into their construction. We repair bricks with bricks, stone with stone, wood with wood, glass with glass. That is exactly what we do, when we eat, for the houses in which our spirits dwell. We are repairing the temples of our bodies, and we must use the sort of materials of which they are constructed. Nothing else could be utilized to the best advantage.
In other words, our food supplies the elements which build, sustain, repair, and renew corresponding elements in our bodies. We eat oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, iron, arsenic, lime, magnesia, potash, soda, silica, etc., to replace similar elements in our bodies. These we find most abundantly in vegetables, fruits, cereals, meats, eggs, fish, milk, etc., and we eat them in sufficient quantities to renew our bodies’ waste, to replace the material which has been burned or consumed by the day’s run of our human mechanism. Whatever we eat which is not like the materials of our bodies will do us no good, because it will find no affinity, no response in any of our tissues, and hence will have to be excluded as poison or waste. The tissues cannot use it, since they can only absorb things like themselves, things which have the same constituent parts. Only brain materials, for instance,—that is, the things that make our brains,—can build, repair, or renew brains. Only the materials which produce bone can be utilized in our skeletons; only foods which contain the materials that the. nerves are made of can build nerves; so that, literally, we are ever eating and reabsorbing the elements of our bodies. Nothing else can be absorbed by our tissues when in health except to our injury.
There are three classes of food that are imperative for the building and maintenance of all the different parts of the body. Albuminous foods, which come mainly from meat, eggs, milk, and the legumes, are good, everyday working foods. Sugars, starches, and fats, called carbohydrates, and vegetables produce various energies in the body, as illustrated in muscular activity, and the different fats which come from both animal and vegetable foods produce heat. We must also have mineral foods, such as iron, lime, phosphorus, magnesia, etc., which purify the blood, give firmness to the tissues, and help to maintain proper electrical tension.
The absence of any of these different forms of food, the tissue builders, the body warmers, the energy producers, or the blood purifiers, would cause starvation in certain tissues, and ultimate death. If the body were fed wholly on the materials which build tissues, the digestive processes and other functions would stop. On the other hand, if we should partake only of the materials which furnish energy alone, the energy of force-forming foods, we should soon die from over activity and the starvation and gradual wasting away of the solid tissues. No matter how much of the starches or sugars or fats you might eat, they would maintain only the energies or the activities of the body, while if you lack tissue builders the structure of your body would begin to deteriorate. The white men who first went to visit South America pined away one by one from tissue starvation, because, while they could get plenty of food, they could not get a sufficient variety to feed all of the tissues. That is, they could not get sufficient flesh formers and flesh warmers in the right proportion to sustain life.
In order, therefore, to maintain perfect health, there must be a balance, a poise, of the different kinds of foods, the tissue builders and renewers and the foods which furnish the heat and support the various energies of the body, as well as certain minerals which are purifiers and regulators of the blood and other secretions, and water, which liquefies and facilitates the carrying of nutrition to the various tissues. Of course, without water the blood circulation would be impossible; for though the water itself does not form tissues or furnish energy, its presence in large amounts is absolutely imperative for carrying on a multitude of life processes. Without it the various chemical changes, the circulation and the secretion of various organic fluids would also be impossible.
An ordinary adult needs from ten to twenty ounces of body warmers, according to activity and climate; that is, of carbonaceous foods, such as sugars, starches, fats, etc.; and five ounces of flesh formers, of nitrogenous foods which contain albumen, etc., or practically at least a pound of body warmers and flesh formers a day from animal or vegetable food.
It is supposed that about seven out of ten ounces of carbonaceous food would be burned in the bodily combustion, making heat and supplying the forces which are used up in the various activities of the body. The remaining three ounces should be used for padding between the muscles and for covering the bones to make the body more comely. When we are working very hard, or in the summer time, we burn up more of our fat and usually get thinner; but it is not safe to burn up all of the heat and energy food each day, because one would then
