Again, we derange our bodies and demoralize our souls by eating too much. The great end of life with many of us is to eat. The American dining-room has become, for the most part, a place for the indulgence of animalism, and not for the development of the affections or social qualities. A distinguished American physician said: “I am sixty-six years old, and I have eaten enough food to answer my wants for 100 years, and yet I am what most people call a small eater.” The popular habit of using, inordinately, appetizers in the shape of the ordinary table condiments, begets a false and unnatural appetite. The time comes when honest food palls upon the depraved senses. The pampered, jaded appetite no longer finds satisfaction in simple food-flavors; the palate must be prompted with pungent things. The cook, who is never a physiologist, responds to the demand for spurs to appetite, and finds them in mixtures of spices and peppers and mustards and acids and essential oils and chemicals, and multitudes of non-food substances. With these, and various biting alcohols, the delicate lining of the stomach is inflamed, inducing a desire for food which passes for what it is not, namely, honest appetite. The palate demands more food than the stomach can digest or the system assimilate. Poor nature, anxious to do the best she can, adapts herself to the unnatural situation, and forces all the other organs to do the same; and thus we become accustomed to over-eating and do not know it. That all who accustom themselves to a stimulating diet, to spices and wines and other irritating things, consume too much food, cannot, I think, be gainsayed. The amount and kind of food needed depends upon the individual habits and the kind of waste to be supplied. A wholly idle man should thrive well on cucumbers and water-melons, which are chiefly water; while the hard-working hod-carrier would demand several pounds of solid carbon and nitrogen daily. It is the sedentary, the well-to-do, the man of leisure, who suffers most from over-eating; and it behooves him to carefully avoid all goads and spurs to appetite. With the simplest flavors he is nearly certain to over-eat and thus to suffer. With an appetite stimulated and induced, without corresponding out-door labor to create a genuine need and demand for it, digestive failure and assimilative bankruptcy is only a question of time.