TOPICS OF THE TIMES

Southland Times, Issue 18824, 18 May 1920, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE TIMES

“I recently received a monkey,” writes Dr T. H. K-ellog in “Good Health.” “It recognised me as a friend, a brother, and extended its hands. I gave it a strawberry.” He goes on; “The monkey had just come from Africa, and I presume had never seen a strawberry before. Lt reached out its hands instantly and seized the berry. It looked at it, smelled of it, tasted it, then its eyes sparkled and immediately that strawberry disappeared. It recognised the strawberry at once as a source of joy and delight and wholesomeness. Then I gave it a leaf of lettuce. It took the leaf, laid hold of it with both hands, smelled it, and in ten seconds the whole leaf of lettuce had disappeared. It recognised the banana immediately. It didn’t have to be introduced. It stripped off the skin and proceeded to engulf it. The monkey knows what is good for it. I envied that monkey as I sat watching it and saw that it had the power to select the things that are wholesome for it. It doesn’t have to send food to the laboratory to have a chemist make an analysis to see whether it is good or not; it has the power within itself to examine the food and det-srmine at once whether it is adapted to its body needs and is wholesome to eat or not.”

“ We used to have monkey-sense, but we have lost it somewhere along the road that we have been travelling during the last two or three hundred thousand years, so that we, do not seem to know anything about what is good for us. We can only tell by watching what happens. If you gave a monkey a poisonous mushroom, there wouldn’t be any danger of its being poisoned by it. Ho would not oast it, but a man would be just as likely to swallow the poisonous one as the one that was not poisonous. You do not catch a monkey in any such catastrophe as that, for the monkey knows good food from bad food. Put a little pepper in his food and he doesn’t want anything to do with it, but half the people in the world haven’t as much sense as the monkey has with reference to pepper. I have introduced this monkey to assist me in teaching dietetics./’