_Too much food is eaten._--Inefficient mastication conduces to excessive eating. Now it is obvious that soft foods, and these constitute the bulk of our modern dietary, pass much more readily into the stomach than coarse, hard foods which compel a certain amount of preliminary mastication, and for this reason the former predispose to excessive eating: hence a danger at all periods of life, not only in grown-ups but in children, even infants; brought up as the latter are, mainly on liquid and pappy foods, many of them consume not only far more than is needful, but far more than is healthful, their stomachs being literally deluged with nutriment. When the food is of a kind necessitating abundant mastication it is much less likely to be taken in excess, for the longer the time spent in mastication the less will the individual be tempted to consume; even in the case of soft food, less will probably be eaten if it be thoroughly masticated and insalivated than if it be bolted. Thorough mastication, however, not only tends to diminish the amount of food consumed on account of the time and labour which it entails; it actually reduces the amount needful to constitute a sufficiency, for the more perfectly the food is chewed the more perfectly is it digested and the more economically is it disposed of in the system; the less, moreover, is the tendency to that morbid craving for food which is so frequent an accompaniment of defective digestion. It is certain that appetite and the needs of the system are sooner satisfied when food is well masticated and digested than when it is swallowed whole. _A mass of unmasticated food may lodge in the throat and cause fatal suffocation._--This may seem to be a very exceptional kind of evil, but I am informed by one whose experience makes him an authority on the ways of the British soldier that it is by no means uncommon for soldiers in barracks to die from this cause. Usually it is when they are under the influence of alcohol that fatal results occur, post-mortem examination disclosing large undigested masses of food in the stomach. A like experience is also frequently met with in the case of men killed by accident.