In early life, when digestion is vigorous, the system excitable, and the habits peculiarly active, a full proportion of vegetable and farinaceous food is proper and salutary. Morning and evening meals of this description, prepared with milk, or taken along with it, are very useful--animal food being reserved for dinner alone. But as age advances and excitability diminishes, and perhaps also as habits of activity and exposure to the open air are changed, the same proportion of vegetable and farinaceous food can no longer be digested so easily, and therefore ought not to be continued. Pastry, rich cakes, puddings, and other articles containing much fatty or oily matter in their composition, are perhaps the most generally indigestible of all kinds of food, and consequently ought never to be eaten when the tone of the stomach is impaired. There are states, however, in which oily articles seem to agree better than lean. I have seen very fat fried bacon, for example, digested with ease at breakfast, where even a small potato would have disordered the stomach. It is very difficult to afford any explanation of the fact, which, however, is not uncommon. Perhaps it is dependent on a peculiar state of the biliary secretion, for Dr Beaumont often remarked that the presence of bile in the stomach facilitates the digestion of fat and oily aliments, and that, even out of the stomach, gastric juice dissolves suet faster when a little bile is added to the mixture, than when the juice is pure. He mentions, moreover, that he never found bile in the stomach, at least during health, except when food of an oily kind had been eaten; and, in accordance with this, I have generally noticed that fried bacon agrees best with what are called “bilious” subjects. Still, however, the quantity must be small, otherwise it will prove injurious. Plain well-cooked animal food, not too recently killed, and eaten in moderate quantity with bread, rice, or roasted potatoes, forms one of the most easily digested meals which can be devised for a weak stomach. Sometimes, however, potato induces acidity and flatulence, and ought not to be used. Venison and most kinds of game are very suitable in the same circumstances. In some conditions of the system, where the condition is irritable and the mode of life not sufficiently active, red highly animalized meat proves too stimulating, although easy of digestion. The same thing happens during recovery from illness; and hence fish, chicken, and other white meats, which excite less and are digested more slowly, are often allowable where beef, mutton, pork, &c. cannot be taken with impunity. For the same reason, white and young meats are the best adapted for the excitable systems of the young. * * * * *