NOTE.——One item well worth considering, especially by the laboring classes who find it so difficult to support a little family on $8 or $10 per week, while imitating the dietetic habits of their employers: Dr. T. L. Nichols, named above, experimenting as to cost of living, has lived week in and week out, in London, at a cost (for food) of sixty or eighty cents per week (taken two meals then), maintaining full vigor, and weight, and performing arduous literary labors, combined with a somewhat active mode of life. Personally, the author was never more vigorous or better fitted for hard work,——in short, better nourished,——than when living for several months on the 1-meal plan and on a diet of unleavened Graham gems and fruit, the total cost of which was less than ten cents per day. CHAPTER XV. THE NATURAL DIET.[68] As the result of personal experience, my mind having been called to the subject by the successful experiment——if, indeed, it can be regarded as an experiment,——of a very intelligent and worthy family in Southern California, I am convinced that the “natural diet,”——uncooked cereals[69] and fruit,——is the diet _par excellence_, as regards strict purity, digestibility, and efficiency. Not only is much less of it required to maintain the normal weight and strength, but it is in other regards superior. One thought I will suggest, in this connection, and one which is more significant, I believe, than many persons would at first consider: raw grain, as all are aware, will “keep” indefinitely under fair conditions; while cooked, it “spoils” in a day or two. The former is more readily and more thoroughly preserved from undesirable changes in the alimentary canal; hence less liability of indigestion. Such portions of whole grain as may be swallowed without mastication, will pass on and out without danger of the putrefactive changes which result from an excess, or deficient mastication of cooked food. Regarding the gustatory pleasure to be derived from a diet of this sort, while it is less seductive to the abnormal appetite, still, even here, no individual really needing food would find this disagreeable, though reference were made solely to whole wheat, masticated with the aid of good teeth; or to the meal, mixed with nice fruit juices or the fruits themselves, when, from unnatural living, the teeth are badly decayed. Our teeth would not fail us if, from childhood, we _used_ them, and our food furnished the material to build and maintain them.