THE REMEDIES OF NATURE.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 353, 23 March 1889, Page 4

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE.

Nature would do a great deal for us in the way of health preservation if we would only leo her. Upon the subject of nature's remedies Dr. Felix L. Oswald wrote an interesting paper some time ago in the Popular Science Jfonthly. He makes some very sensible observations upon the habitual sins committed by the human family against the laws of nature. He says that "before our ancestors colonised the colder latitudes of this planet, the equatorial regions had for ages been inhabited by men or man-like four-handers. The influence of this long abode in the tropics stiil asserts itself in many peculiarities of our physical constitution. We are but half acclimatised. Wolves are weather proof; bears and badgers have managed to inure themselves to the miasma of their winter dens : but the primates of the animal kingdom can neither endure cold nor breathe impure air with impunity ; and of most of our civilised fellow-men, as well as of savages and all the species of our four-handed relatives who have thus far been wintered in northern menagerie?, ltmay be said that the sensitiveness of their lungs contrasts strangely with the tough vigour of their digestive organs. In proportion to hi 3 size, a rhesus baboon eats more than a wolf; between morning and night a monkey will devour his own weight in bananas, and, where the cravings of a naturally vigorous stomach are increa&ed by the stimulus of a cold climate, it seems almost impossible to surfeit a savage with palatable tood ; his appetite is the faithful exponent of his peptic capacity, and before the fauces positively refuse to ingest there is little danger that the gastric apparatus will fail to digest. Manifold and enormous must have been our sins against the dietary code of nature before we could succeed in making indigestion a chronic disease. But," he continues, " their descendants finally solved that problem. To thcaleoholic stimulants of the ancients weihaveaddedtea, coflee, tobacco, absinthe, chloral, opium, and pungent spices. Every year increases the number of our elaborately unwhole-some-made dishes, and decreases our devotion to the field sports that helped our forelathers? to digest their boar-steaks. We have no time to masticate our food ; we bolt it, i and grumble if we cannot bolt it smoking hot. The competition of our domestic and public kitchen tempts us to eat three full meals a day, and two of them at a time when the exigencies of our business routine leaves us no leisure for digestion. At night, when the opportunity for that leisure arrives, we counteract the efforts of the digestive apparatus by hot stove-tires and stifling bedrooms. Since the beginning of the commercial-epicurean age of the nineteenth century the votaries of fashion have persistently vied in compelling their stomachs to dispose ol the largest possible amount of the most indigestible food under the least favourable circumstances."