A more serious reason why high seasonings leads to intemperance, is in the perversion of the use of the sense of taste.  Certain senses are given us to add to our pleasure as well as for the practical, almost indispensable, use they are to us.  For instance, the sense of sight is not only useful, but enables us to drink in beauty, if among beautiful surroundings, without doing us any harm.  The same of music and other harmonics which may come to us through the sense of hearing.  But the sense of taste and was given us to distinguish between wholesome and unwholesome foods, and cannot be used for merely sensuous gratification, without debasing and making of it a gross thing.  An education which demands special enjoyment or pleasure through the sense of taste, is wholly artificial; it is coming down to the animal plane, or below it rather; for the instinct of the brute creation teaches it merely to eat to live.

Yet how wide-spread is this habit of sensuous gratification through the sense of taste!  If one calls upon a neighbor, he is at once offered refreshments of some kind, as though the greatest blessing of life came from indulging the appetite.  This evil is largely due to wrong education, which begins with childhood.  When Johnnie sits down to the table, the mother says, “Johnnie, what would you like?” instead of putting plain, wholesome food before the child, and taking it as a matter of course that he will eat it and be satisfied.  The child grows to think that he must have what he likes, whether it is good for him or not.  It is not strange that an appetite thus pampered in childhood becomes uncontrollable at maturity; for the step from gormandizing to intoxication is much shorter than most people imagine.  The natural, unperverted taste of a child will lead him to eat that which is good for him.  But how can we expect the children to reform when the parents continually set them bad examples in the matter of eating and drinking?

The cultivation of a taste for spices is a degradation of the sense of taste.  Nature never designed that pleasure should be divorced from use.  The effects of gratifying the sense of taste differ materially from those of gratifying the higher senses of sight and hearing.  What we see is gone; nothing remains but the memory, and the same is true of the sweetest sounds which may reach us through the ears.  But what we taste is taken into the stomach and what has thus given us brief pleasure through the gratification of the palate, must make work in the alimentary canal for fourteen hours before it is disposed of.

VARIETY IN FOOD.—­Simplicity of diet should be a point of first consideration with all persons upon whom falls the responsibility of providing the family bills of fare, since the simplest foods are, as a rule, the most healthful.  Variety is needed; that is, a judicious mingling of fruits, grains, and vegetables; but the general tendency is to supply our tables with too many kinds and to prepare each