Men who have to work, quickly find out what they require in the way of food. The Irishman who, while doing little work, will live contentedly on potatoes, asks for better flesh-forming food when engaged in heavy labour. In fact, the employer of the working man, so far from feeling aggrieved when his men require an improvement in their diet, either as respects quality or quantity, ought to look on the want as evidence that they are really working hard in his service, and also that they have a capacity for continuous work. The man who lives on less than the average share of flesh-forming food is doing less than an average amount of work; the man who is unable to eat an average quantity of flesh-forming food, is _unable_ to do an average amount of work. “‘On what principle do you discharge your men?’ I once said,” relates Dr. Lankester, “to a railway contractor. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s according to their appetites.’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘how do you judge of that?’ ‘Why,’ he said, ‘I send a clerk round when they are getting their dinners, and those who can’t eat he marks with a bit of chalk, and we send them about their business.’” At a lecture delivered at the Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History at Florence, by Professor Mantegazza, a few years since, the Professor dwelt on the insufficient food which Italians are in the habit of taking, as among the most important causes of the weakness of the nation. “Italians,” he said, “you should follow as closely as you can the example of the English in your eating and in your drinking, in the choice of flesh-meat (in tossing off bumpers of your rich wines),[43] in the quality of your coffee, your tea, and your tobacco. I give you this advice, dear countrymen, not only as a medical man, but also as a patriot. It is quite evident, from the way millions of you perform the process which you call eating and drinking, that you have not the most elementary notions of the laws of physiology. You imagine that you are living. You are barely prolonging existence on maccaroni and water-melons. You neither know how to eat nor how to drink. You have no muscular energy; and, therefore, you have no continuous mental energy. The weakness of the individual, multiplied many millions of times, results in the collective weakness of the nation. Hence results insufficient work, and thence insufficient production. Thus the returns of the tax-collector and the custom-house officer are scanty, and the national exchequer suffers accordingly.” Nor is all this, strange as it may sound, the mere gossip of the lecture-room. “The question of good feeding,” says Dr. Lankester, “is one of national importance. It is vain to expect either brain or muscles to do efficient work when they are not provided with the proper material. Neither intellectual nor physical work can be done without good food.”