I have said that the pre-agricultural infant was unable to secure starch in any quantity by means of his incisors. These teeth enabled him, however, to obtain some soluble nutriment from fruits, and Dr. Sim Wallace has suggested that the early eruption of the lower incisors is for the purpose of enabling the infant to pierce the outer covering of fruits so as to permit him to extract the soluble contents by suction; and, accordingly, when these teeth are cut we may allow the child to bite at such vegetable substances as apples, oranges, and sugar-cane. The latter is a useful article of diet for children, for it provides soluble saccharide in a diluted form, and it is advisable that the child should receive his cane sugar well diluted, for it must be remembered that before the agricultural period man’s supply of pure sugar was limited to wild honey which, consisting as it does almost entirely of mono-saccharide (grape sugar and fruit sugar), is very easily disposed of by the digestive organs. Nowadays, the less digestible cane sugar (which is a di-saccharide) is very largely consumed in the undiluted state, in which it is apt to set up disturbance. When, however, it is obtained by chewing the sugar-cane, it is diluted both by the water in the cane and by the saliva, and I should like to see children obtain most of their cane sugar in this way. The consideration of the conditions obtaining for pre-agricultural man not only strongly suggests that the young human of to-day should be given starch in very moderate quantities up to the twelfth month, but it points an even more important lesson--viz., that this substance should be given not, as is the custom, as liquid or pap, but in a form compelling vigorous mastication, for it is certain that early man, from the time he emerged from the ape till he discovered how to cook his vegetable food, obtained practically all his starch in such a form; it cannot too often be repeated that uncooked starch in the natural state, locked up as it is in chambers of indigestible cellulose, has no nutritive value; these chambers need first to be broken up by prolonged and energetic chewing, and in this way much or most of the starch is converted in the mouth into dextrines and maltose, very little passing into the stomach in the crude state to set up disturbance in that organ and later in the bowel. If it is given as liquid or pap it will pass down as starch into the stomach, while if it is administered in a form which obliges the child to chew it properly, not only will the jaws, the teeth, and the gums obtain the exercise which they crave, and without which they cannot develop normally, but the starch will be so thoroughly insalivated that much of it will be converted within the mouth into maltose. How foolish to upset the child’s digestive system by deluging it with liquid starch, and then to endeavour to correct matters by giving the malt extract which the child can and should