No one has a stronger sense of the injury done to society by the wide departure from the laws of Nature by which its present arrangements are characterized, and no one is more willing to contribute all that is within his power to reform them, than the writer of these pages; but let the whole system be amended, and do not limit the reform simply to altering the hour of dinner, while the conditions which have led to the existing arrangement are left unchanged. In the country, even among the higher classes, a greater approximation to the order of Nature is observable than in towns. The inducements to sleep away the day and to be awake during the night are diminished; bodily exercise and exposure to the open air are more indulged in; the appetite becomes keener, and digestion more vigorous; and, as a necessary result, meals are taken an hour or two earlier. But, throughout all these changes, the general feature of having some kind of refreshment, either luncheon or dinner, within four, five, or six hours after breakfast, may be pretty accurately traced. If business admits of it, and the person can then command two hours of relaxation, the best plan, unquestionably, is to dine about five or six hours after breakfast. But if this be impossible, and active exertion of mind or body must be continued for several hours longer, it will be far better to eat some light refreshment in the forenoon, and to postpone dinner not only till business is over, but _till half an hour or an hour’s repose has allowed its attendant excitement or fatigue to subside_. By this means the stomach will enter upon its duties with vigour, and the dinner be digested with greater comfort and dispatch than if we sit down to table the moment our work is finished. In this way the tedious quarter of an hour, preceding the announcement of “_dinner_,” is far from being lost to the subsequent digestion. Very few people indeed can eat a good dinner and return immediately to bodily or intellectual labour with continued impunity. On this account, actors, for example, whose vocation requires exertion of both mind and body, almost all either dine very early, or take their chief meal at night on their return home, the latter being the more common practice. Students, literary men, and persons intently engaged in business, are very apt to damage themselves by neglecting relaxation at and after meals.