In both cases the sympathy and sentiment were the same, and the author believes it to be universal. All that is needed to guard against helplessness is concentration of interest, for a little time, on this one elementary need, and the full measure of reform will soon be in effective operation. While the conferences above referred to were being held, the author had opportunity to learn the existing conditions, relative to the greatest and most fundamental needs in approaching and perfecting a reform of the kind recommended, and learned that uncertain, irregular, or otherwise faulty nourishment is the cause of much perversion among the poor, and is especially harmful to the young among them. The author had just completed his initial experiments, and had published the booklet "What Sense? or, Economic Nutrition," and by them saw a way to provide teachers, mothers, and other child protectors with a teachable theory of nutrition that seemed to him to be scientific but simple, and which had been most gratifyingly effective wherever it had been intelligently tried. But in the course of these lecture conferences it developed that more than the unsupported word of a layman was necessary in order to even command attention in a matter that everybody thought they knew all about themselves, and in whose general opinion the whole world joined. It did not seem credible, although quite logical, that health, morals, temperament, physical efficiency, and all the requirements of virtue and good citizenship could be mended or modified by mere attention to the ingestion of food and more careful eating. As time went on it seemed evident to the author that not only was a right intelligence, relative to the initial act of nutrition, helpful in conserving health, but that it was fundamentally necessary to physical efficiency, mental clearness, and moral tone, and that all work, which was done by educators without this basic knowledge as an underlying necessity of teaching or training, could but be simply ameliorative and not curative in its effect; and, failing to be able to say the convincing word himself, it seemed necessary for the author to interest the highest physiological authority in the subject and make demonstration a means of convincing them. This, in order that they might speak to deaf ears with the effectiveness of the megaphone, while poor lay I, the author, could not raise my voice above a whisper. In transferring this book to the "A.B.C. Series," and linking it up with the "A.B.-Z. of Our Own Nutrition," and other books of the "Series," the megaphonic connection has been established, and now the attorney for the waifs is ready to turn on a renewed current of sympathy and see what will happen.