Do not these various evidences endorse our argument respecting the feeding of children?  Do they not imply that, even supposing the same stature and bulk to be attained on an innutritive as on a nutritive diet, the quality of tissue is greatly inferior?  Do they not establish the position that, where energy as well as growth has to be maintained, it can only be done by high feeding?  Do they not confirm the a priori conclusion that, though a child of whom little is expected in the way of bodily or mental activity, may thrive tolerably well on farinaceous substances, a child who is daily required, not only to form the due amount of new tissue, but to supply the waste consequent on great muscular action, and the further waste consequent on hard exercise of brain, must live on substances containing a larger ratio of nutritive matter?  And is it not an obvious corollary, that denial of this better food will be at the expense either of growth, or of bodily activity, or of mental activity; as constitution and circumstances determine?  We believe no logical intellect will question it.  To think otherwise is to entertain in a disguised form the old fallacy of the perpetual-motion schemers—­that it is possible to get power out of nothing.

Before leaving the question of food, a few words must be said on another requisite—­variety.  In this respect the dietary of the young is very faulty.  If not, like our soldiers, condemned to “twenty years of boiled beef,” our children have mostly to bear a monotony which, though less extreme and less lasting, is quite as clearly at variance with the laws of health.  At dinner, it is true, they usually have food that is more or less mixed, and that is changed day by day.  But week after week, month after month, year after year, comes the same breakfast of bread-and-milk, or, it may be, oatmeal-porridge.  And with like persistence the day is closed, perhaps with a second edition of the bread-and-milk, perhaps with tea and bread-and-butter.

This practice is opposed to the dictates of physiology.  The satiety produced by an often-repeated dish, and the gratification caused by one long a stranger to the palate, are not meaningless, as people carelessly assume; but they are the incentives to a wholesome diversity of diet.  It is a fact, established by numerous experiments, that there is scarcely any one food, however good, which supplies in due proportions or right forms all the elements required for carrying on the vital processes in a normal manner:  whence it follows that frequent change of food is desirable to balance the supplies of all the elements.  It is a further fact, known to physiologists, that the enjoyment given by a much-liked food is a nervous stimulus, which, by increasing the action of the heart and so propelling the blood with increased vigour, aids in the subsequent digestion.  And these truths are in harmony with the maxims of modern cattle-feeding, which dictate a rotation of diet.