Experience, indeed, amply demonstrates that precocious and excessive activity of intellect and vivacity of feeling are most powerful impediments to healthy and vigorous digestion, and consequently to a sufficient nutrition. In early life, therefore, when not only health but future usefulness depend mainly on the completeness and vigour with which the system shall proceed towards its full development, the preservation of the digestive organs by suitable diet, exercise, and regimen, ought to be a primary object of attention with every sensible parent. Even as regards superiority of mind, the healthy development of the body is of essential importance, as the only sure foundation on which mental excellence can be built; because, so long as mind and body are intimately connected with each other, the former must continue to be affected by every change in the condition of the organization on which it depends. We enjoy acuteness of vision by preserving the eye in high health, and exercising it regularly and moderately; and in like manner, we can obtain and preserve intellectual power only by preserving the health of the brain, and exercising it in conformity with its natural constitution. Instead, then, of feeding the closely confined and excitable children of the middle and higher classes from early infancy on quantities of stimulating animal food, and even giving them wine and fermented liquors, we shall act more in accordance with the laws of Nature by restricting them, during the three or four earliest years of childhood, chiefly to a mild farinaceous diet, with a small allowance of meat on alternate days; and by seeking to increase their digestive power and bodily vigour by constant exercise in the open air, before giving them a more solid diet. By these means the development of the organization, the keenness of appetite, the tone of digestion, and the desire of, and fitness of the system for, animal food, will increase in regular proportion, and a free supply of that species of aliment will even become necessary to carry on the growth. In short, it must ever be remembered, that strength is to be obtained not from the kind of food which contains most nourishment in itself, but from that which is best adapted to the condition of the digestive organs at the time when it is taken.