though he had only head and lower limbs, and was without arms or trunk. He attempted to move the arms, but they were completely paralyzed and the flexor muscles of the fingers were violently contracted. Turchini took his hand and he experienced a sensation of intense cold; Turchini pinched him strongly, but he had no sensation; in his hands and forearm was observed a marked hyperemia.

After three or four minutes, Broca was able to move the flexor muscles of the arm; a quarter of an hour later he succeeded in moving also the fingers, and with great difficulty he was able to write a few words. The action of the interosseous muscles was not properly restored until some hours later. With the faculty of moving himself sensibility was also restored to Broca; as to the hyperesthesia to cold, this remained for about half an hour longer. Finally he became able to walk a little in the laboratory, but suddenly he became worn out as though he had traveled a long distance; after some time he returned to his home and was able slowly to ascend the five easy steps. When indoors, he lay on the bed, and then, little by little, he was entirely restored.

Later phenomena. An hour and a half later he was seized with a violent palpitation of the heart; his pulse beat violently, stopped for two seconds, then set to beating

forcibly and hurriedly; then ensued another long cessation, then the phenomena recommenced and lasted for from half an hour to three-quarters of an hour; finally, they ceased; but the cardiac arhythmia was prolonged until 9 o'clock next morning, at which hour it ceased from time to time. The only sensation that Broca yet experienced was extreme lassitude, which disappeared entirely thirty-six hours after the accident.

Remarks. The paralysis may be explained, either by the action of the current on the nerve centers, or by the prostration occasioned by the spasm and by the direct action of the current on the tissues. Broca inclines to the second view, since the muscles of the various parts of the body regained their mobility later in proportion to the strength of the current's action upon them respectively.

As to the cardiac phenomena rectifying themselves an hour and a half after the accident, Broca supposes that they were due to the presence in the blood of toxins produced by the violent irritation occasioned by the passage of the current. He sought to verify this hypothesis by subjecting a dog to the same action; but the animal showed itself entirely refractory and endured the experiment many times for two seconds without giving any sign of dis

tress.

FOREIGNERS assert that we Americans are the most extravagant people on the face of the globe. The leading item in which we exhibit our extravagance, at least the one which is at the bottom of all our extravagances, relates to the foods we select, the foods we reject and the foods we

waste.

This state of things results from two principal causes-ignorance and radically faulty habits and fashions of domestic management. We do not know how to buy well, and haven't the moral courage and independence to use our knowledge if we had it.

Perhaps it is true, as claimed by the diet reformers, that we eat too much and of the wrong kinds of food; but this phase of the subject it is not the present purpose to discuss.

Statistics show that the cost of living in the large cities of the United States, and to a certain extent throughout the country, has within a few years reached high water mark. It has probably never been so high since the genesis of the republic. Work is in demand and wages are high; otherwise, the so-called poor, as well as all in the lower classes, would not be able to make ends meet or to keep the gaunt wolf of hunger from the door.

This is not because the country is not productive, not because crops have failed and not because of excessive rates of transportation from harvest field to market. It is largely because we have drifted into a commercial rut from which there seems to be no prospect of immediate extrication. Speaking in round numbers, the baker turns a 300-loaf barrel of $4 flour into 400 loaves of puffy, over-fermented and innutritious

bread, that retails for $20 and contributes the lion's share toward making a race of dyspeptics. In other words, the consumer pays twice its commercial, and five times its nutritive or intrinsic, value for his delusive "staff of life!"

The butchers and purveyors of beef and mutton, pig and poultry, have combined in a universal trust, by which meats of every kind are kept at prices that are twice what they should be, if we consider the prices realized by the herdsmen and poulterers. Fruit is no whit behind as to the disproportion between price paid to producer and cost charged the consumer. The price of flour by the barrel, of course, is an exception, but the consumer rarely buys by the barrel.

The occasion of these expanded prices is not the extra cost of production, nor the high prices paid to producers of the necessaries of life. The jobbers of produce have been successful in establishing a commercial reign of terror. No item in the provision line reaches the hands of the consumer until it has passed through the hands. of a number of these cormorants, has been heavily tolled by each of them and its price. practically multiplied by three. These produce jobbers are all bears in buying and bulls in selling. Meanwhile the drones of commerce, the middlemen, multiply, and are by no means slow in taking their cue from the tricky and unscrupulous jobbers. The combine is consummately organized, and both producer and consumer are utterly helpless. The producer sits by his evening lamp in the country, reads the quotations in the city journals and dreams of realizing, or wonders why he cannot tealize, something near the prices named, less.

do not need such favors. It is the rich who hold "franks" from the express companies. A few days ago the daily papers were remarking on the rather humorous phase of a news item to the effect that a Western governor attempted to use his frank to cover the expressing of the family cow from one city to another. The editor had nothing to say about the propriety of franks in general, and the public is so used to these dishonest and dishonorable practices that no one will think of the matter a second time. If a citizen's name or bank book is especially prominent or large the railway companies tender him a private car.

These are some of the reasons why the poor are said to be growing poorer and the rich richer all the time. In a sense it is true. To him that hath everybody contributes, and from him who hath not evervbody snatches something, even to the last rag on his back. And this principle, alas! is said to be endorsed by the teachings of Christianity!

The remedy seems far off. People have become so used to being skinned in this regulation way that they talk about the process as if it were honorable and legitimate commerce. It is beyond question "established usage," and all the courts uphold it, hence it must be "legal." It may even be moral, by the lax standards of business morality now recognized. But the entire system has been built up at utter variance with the laws of universal equity and domestic economy. It makes the average individual and the average family slaves to their mere bodily wants, appetites and necessities.

There are too many middlemen frantically struggling with each other for their share of these unnecessary and exorbitant margins. They constitute a practical and piratical domestic tariff on the products of the soil, and the output of the furnace and factory. The pseudo-political economists waste much breath on tariff talk, reciprocity and protection, and on parrot-like reiterations of the ancient cry of "free trade and sailors' rights." Most of it is talk that could be better spent in an honest endeavor to

drive out of the congested cities the horde of drones who never make any honey, but live by taxing the labor of the man with the hoe. Let them seek out the abandoned farms of New England, and the half-worked farms of the middle West, and of the far West, and make two blades of grass and two stalks of wheat, corn or oats grow where but one now stuntedly grows, for lack of cultivation and fertilization. In this way the prevailing prosperity might easily be doubled by bringing producer and consumer into closer and more mutual relations.

MASTICATION AND LONGEVITY.

THE example and experience of Luigi Cornaro has been a theme for vegetarians and diet reformers for many years. Some of the lessons he taught might still be more emphasized and can hardly be too often quoted. Especially is this true of the rising generation, many of whom have never heard the name of Cornaro. He was born in 1467 and is said to have reached the age of 103 at his death. Some of the vegetarian writers have insisted that he died at 140, but evidently drew on their imaginations for about forty years.

The salient points in the history of this Venetian nobleman are that he lived the ways of the world until he found himself an invalid-rather a hopeless one at thatat forty. Under medical advice he then reformed his diet, gradually reducing it from the overgenerous allowance, then fashionable with people of unlimited means, to a daily allowance of twelve ounces of solid food and fourteen ounces of wine. He was so much improved by this change that at the end of some years he further reduced his ration until he found that he could maintain his strength and flesh on as little as one egg a day for the solid food part of it.

Having followed this abstemious diet for many years, at the age of 70 he inadvertently or in response to friendly advice

added two ounces of additional solid food to his ration. According to his own opinion, the addition came near proving fatal. A return to his former extreme abstemiousness brought about his recovery, and at the several advanced ages of 86, 91 and 95 he wrote treatises on his "Method for Obtaining Long and Healthful Life." These works urged temperance and restricted diet as the prime means for that purpose, and were models of earnestness, cheerfulness and good sense.

Last year Dr. Van Someren undertook some experiments to determine the truth or error of Cornaro's conclusions. Taking the experiment of Dr. Snyder, a laboratory assistant of the United States Department of Agriculture, with which to compare and contrast one of his own, the former based on a dietary that might be classed as overfeeding, his own subject being placed on a very much reduced diet, and the results in each case being carefully watched and analyzed. The two diets are thus stated:

"The daily diet of Dr. Snyder's subject consisted of 31⁄2 pounds of potatoes, eight eggs, 11⁄2 pints of milk, and half a pint of cream; the writer's diet consisted of three eggs, and the remainder of the twelve ounces in potatoes and an equal quantity of the

indefinitely. Nevertheless the lesson is unavoidable.

The same author insists that more thorough mastication and perfect insalivation of all food ingested is more important than even its quality. He asserts that there is a pharyngeal reflex that can be made a safe guide as to when one has eaten enough food. food. By noting and cultivating this normal reflex, which modern habits of eating have almost obliterated, one can be his own prescriber as to quantity of food which it is discreet to consume at any meal. By adopting this guide and taking pains to masticate every particle of food taken into his mouth until it became a homogeneous mass and lost its flavor, this author cured himself of two maladies that had rendered him ineligible to life insurance, reduced his weight from 205 to 165 pounds and recovered perfect health. Furthermore, he accomplished these brilliant results without practising any rules of abstemiousness as to quality or quantity of food consumed. It required about four weeks to acquire the reflex mentioned.

Modern Medicine has this interesting. editorial:

In each of these cases the nutritive equilibrium was maintained, which would seem to prove that ordinary mortals eat about five times as much as their systems require.

True the experiments were continued but for a brief period (43 and 5 days), and it would not be logical to infer that the conditions and results would have continued

Pawlow's discovery of a method by which the phenomena of gastric digestion, particularly the functions of acid and pepsin formation, could be more accurately studied, has led to practical results of the highest value. In all previous experiments, the results have been seriously complicated by the admixture of the food stuffs with the gastric secretions, so that the conclusions drawn were necessarily more or less inaccurate, and, in many cases, it was impossible to derive from the data thus obtained any accurate or trustworthy conclusions. whatever. Pawlow, however, discovered at means by which this difficulty could be overcome. He devised an operation where