the extremest austerities into an almost demoniac wickedness.  They simply exhibit the uncontrollable vehemence of long-denied desires.  Consider the ordinary tastes and the ordinary treatment of children.  The love of sweets is conspicuous and almost universal among them.  Probably ninety-nine people in a hundred presume that there is nothing more in this than gratification of the palate; and that, in common with other sensual desires, it should be discouraged.  The physiologist, however, whose discoveries lead him to an ever-increasing reverence for the arrangements of things, suspects something more in this love of sweets than is currently supposed; and inquiry confirms the suspicion.  He finds that sugar plays an important part in the vital processes.  Both saccharine and fatty matters are eventually oxidised in the body; and there is an accompanying evolution of heat.  Sugar is the form to which sundry other compounds have to be reduced before they are available as heat-making food; and this formation of sugar is carried on in the body.  Not only is starch changed into sugar in the course of digestion, but it has been proved by M. Claude Bernard that the liver is a factory in which other constituents of food are transformed into sugar:  the need for sugar being so imperative that it is even thus produced from nitrogenous substances when no others are given.  Now, when to the fact that children have a marked desire for this valuable heat-food, we join the fact that they have usually a marked dislike to that food which gives out the greatest amount of heat during oxidation (namely, fat), we have reason for thinking that excess of the one compensates for defect of the other—­that the organism demands more sugar because it cannot deal with much fat.  Again, children are fond of vegetable acids.  Fruits of all kinds are their delight; and, in the absence of anything better, they will devour unripe gooseberries and the sourest of crabs.  Now not only are vegetable acids, in common with mineral ones, very good tonics, and beneficial as such when taken in moderation; but they have, when administered in their natural forms, other advantages.  “Ripe fruit,” says Dr. Andrew Combe, “is more freely given on the Continent than in this country; and, particularly when the bowels act imperfectly, it is often very useful.”  See, then, the discord between the instinctive wants of children and their habitual treatment.  Here are two dominant desires, which in all probability express certain needs of the child’s constitution; and not only are they ignored in the nursery-regimen, but there is a general tendency to forbid the gratification of them.  Bread-and-milk in the morning, tea and bread-and-butter at night, or some dietary equally insipid, is rigidly adhered to; and any ministration to the palate is thought needless, or rather, wrong.  What is the consequence?  When, on fete-days, there is unlimited access to good things—­when a gift of pocket-money brings the contents of the