* * * * * About ten years ago, at the critical age of forty-four, the author was fast becoming a physical wreck in the midst of a business, club, and social tempest. Although he was trained as an athlete in his youth and had lived an active and most agreeable life, he had contracted a degree of physical disorder that made him ineligible as an insurance risk. This unexpected disability, with such unmistakable warning, was so much a shock to his hopes of a long life that it led to his making a strong personal effort to save himself. The study was taken up in systematic manner, account of which is too long to relate here; but the eager auto-reformer soon learned that his troubles came from _too much_ of many things, among them too much food and too much needless worry; and realising the danger ahead, he sought a way to cure himself of his disabilities by the help of an economic food supply, as did Luigi Cornaro; but what is even more important, he found a way to enjoy the smaller quantity of food much more than any plethoric luxury can give, and arrived at the method by a route that showed a means of conserving a healthy economy and an increased pleasure of eating, at the same time, in quite a simple and scientific manner, that any one may learn and practise without any ascetic deprivation whatever. Cornaro buried the real clew to his economic and pleasurable success with his body, owing to his vague generality of description of his method. The author is determined not to make the same mistake, and thereby bury _his_ key to a happy and easy life. * * * * * The secret of the method is all told in this book and is confirmed herein by both theoretically scientific and scientifically practical authority; but the experiments which are being conducted at Yale by Professor Chittenden, in coöperation with Surgeon-General O’Reilly of the army, of which the _Daily Press_ has given notice, together with experiments which are in progress in many university laboratories in this country and in Europe, are for the purpose of explaining the “reasons for things” by complete scientific reasoning, so that none may doubt the disadvantage and sin of dietic ignorance and carelessness. The acceptance of the theory and method of the author at the great Battle Creek Sanitarium, after more than a year’s trial, and elsewhere among curative agencies, and their adoption and use as the first requisite of treatment, of which the public have not so generally heard, are indorsements coming from practical, intelligent, and expert sources of experience and judgment, and hence they are of the utmost value and significance. * * * * *