So long as man lives the life of a pure savage, he has good health without ever bestowing a thought upon the matter. Nature, like a good farmer, saves the best for seed. The mightiest bull becomes the father of the herd; the great warrior, the great hunter, has the most wives and children. The sickly children are destroyed by the hardships of savage life, and those who survive are compelled to put forth such exertions in procuring food and defending their wigwams that they are always "in training." The pure savage has not the skill nor the time to extract from the wilds in which he lives the poisons that could deprave his taste and impair his vigor. Your Indian sleeps, with scanty covering, in a wigwam that freely admits the air. In his own way, he is an exquisite cook. Neither Delmonico nor Parker nor Professor Blot ever cooked a salmon or a partridge as well as a Rocky Mountain Indian cooks them; and when he has cooked his fish or his bird, he eats with it some perfectly simple preparation of Indian corn. He is an absolutely _unstimulated_ animal. The natural working of his internal machinery generates all the vital force he wants. He is as healthy as a buffalo, as a prize-fighter, as the stroke-oar of a university boat. But in our civilized, sedentary life, he who would have good health must fight for it. Many people have the insolence to become parents who have no right to aspire to that dignity; children are born who have no right to exist; and skill preserves many whom nature is eager to destroy. Civilized man, too, has learned the trick of heading off some of the diseases that used to sweep over whole regions of the earth, and lay low the weakliest tenth of the population. Consequently, while the average duration of human life has been increased, the average tone of human health has been lowered. Fewer die, and fewer are quite well. Very many of us breathe vitiated air, and keep nine tenths of the body quiescent for twenty-two or twenty-three hours out of every twenty-four. Immense numbers cherish gloomy, depressing opinions, and convert the day set apart for rest and recreation into one which aggravates some of the worst tendencies of the week, and counteracts none of them. Half the population of the United States violate the laws of nature every time they take sustenance; and the children go, crammed with indigestion, to sit six hours in hot, ill-ventilated or unventilated school-rooms. Except in a few large towns, the bread and meat are almost universally inferior or bad; and the only viands that are good are those which ought not to be eaten at all. At most family tables, after a course of meat which has the curious property of being both soft and tough, a wild profusion of ingenious puddings, pies, cakes, and other abominable trash, beguiles the young, disgusts the mature, and injures all. From bodies thus imperfectly nourished, we demand excessive exertions of all kinds.