SOME POPULAR ERRORS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3763, 16 April 1907, Page 4

SOME POPULAR ERRORS.

While lecturing to the members of the Australasian Massage Association in Melbourne last week, Professor Osborne attacked with an unsparing hand some of the superstitions that the average layman entertains in regard to his own ' body. Parents have been consoling themselves for centuries with the belief that the noisy child who keeps them awake half the night with his cries is developing a fine pair of lungs. But according to the Professor the amount of noise a baby can make is no index at all to the strength ot the lungs. It is the size and shape of the infant’s larynx that governs the volume of sound it can produce. Then we have been told by vegetarians and by many newspaper articles that bananas are an ideal diet, and that a man might live upon them in perfect health without touching*any other food. The Professor declares, however that to sustain life on bananas alone a man would have to consume fifty for breakfast, fifty for dinner, and fiity for tea, and that even then he would obtain less nourishment than he could get from a moderate amount of sugar. He also scoffs at the idea that fish food is better for the brain than any other form of food. Brown bread, he says, is no more nourishing than white bread, and meat extract is not particularly sustaining. Nuts may do well enough for monkeys, but they would not keep a man alive, and if oatmeal were the universal diet the human race would rapidly deteriorate. The Professor has no respect for even the venerable theory that the amount of oxygen in the air regulates the whole range of human activities. The proportion of oxygen, he maintains, may be reduced from 2t per cent, to 17 per cent., without producing any disastrous consequence. The ozone we all have been seeking at our seaside resorts may be a poisonous gas, causing an intense irritation of the mucous membrauce. Finally, the vermiform appendix, weich has become well known of late years as the seat of appendicitis, instead of being a useless and dangerous remnant of the past, as the layman has supposed, is a progressive organ, that is being developed by the higher aspirations f the body towards the greater destiny of mankind.