On the other hand, many children take up the almost equally injurious habit of churning their food about in the mouth for an unreasonable time. This habit is a very common one with Anglo-Indian children and should always be checked, as the prolonged mumbling of each mouthful stimulates an undue flow of saliva, and produces dyspepsia by flooding the stomach with it. It is really, I believe, due to want of appetite, and is generally caused by the monotonous and insipid diet to which children are often confined, while they watch their parents consuming appetising dishes which they are not allowed to touch. Surely it is hard to expect the child to swallow a stodgy mass of boiled flour and milk, with the savour of crisply fried bacon under its nose; and why should a child whom Nature has already provided with a full set of teeth be less able to digest a simple wholesome article of food, such as this, than an adult? No one would suggest the giving of large quantities of such delicacies, of which, indeed, adults very commonly consume a good deal more than is good for them; but some bread and butter with a few scraps of bacon and some bread crisply fried in the fat, eaten with a relish that stimulates the proper flow of the digestive secretions, is surely more likely to be properly assimilated than some insipid mess, eaten under compulsion, with difficulty and loathing. It is often impossible to find any good reason for popular maternal notions as to what children should eat, drink and avoid, but the broad principle underlying it appears to be that anything nice is necessarily harmful. “Children should be given only simple food.” Doubtless!--but what is “simple food”? Food, I take it, which it is a simple job to digest. But it is quite a mistake to imagine that every insipid mess is easy, and every tasty relish difficult, of digestion. Some insipid foods are easily digestible and some not, and some tasty foods are indigestible and some digestible. The taste and savour are in fact no guide whatever. To pursue our particular example:--bacon fat is an exceptionally easily assimilated form of fatty matter, rivalling cod liver oil in that respect; and every whit as useful in the treatment of malnutrition. Again, the method of preparation makes all the difference as to digestibility. Cheese, for instance, of the cheaper varieties, is proverbially hard to digest, for the obvious reason that it is difficult for the digestive organs to dissolve its rather leathery substance, but a crumbling Stilton taken in reasonable quantities is far from being so; and even less expensive cheeses, if grated and cooked, are quite harmless, so that a dish of macaroni just flavoured with a little grated cheese is a far more suitable food for a child than the pasty gruel that passes under the style of oatmeal porridge southward of the Tweed.