A SENSELESS TAKE-OFF.

A HAT in an elevator. If a woman is in the car, should it be left on the head or taken off?

We were riding in an elevator the other day. Four men and one woman were passengers. One man, deftly, swiftly, somewhat shamefacedly, removed his hat. The other three, including the "we," kept the chapeau on. Were the three ungentlemanly? We think not. An office elevator is simply a stairway wherein, or on, people are elevated, not by their muscle power, but by machine power. Both elevatorway and stairway are public passageways, as much so as the hallway, only the first is perpendicular, the second slanting, the third horizontal. No man thinks of doffing his headpiece when accompanying a lady through the hall or up the stairway. Why, then, should he make himself hatless in the elevatorway? We believe in a becoming deference to ladies, but let us be consistent and not overdue the homage act.

Off-the-hat fiend will please take notice. If he still insists on elevator hat-tipping, let him also denude his head of its covering in hall and on stairway, or else forever remain overpolite and illogical.

PASSING AWAY.

TAKE a walk through any of the cemeteries throughout the country and you will believe with us that fools are slowly but surely passing away.

With silent tread you pass the last resting place of the individual who blew into an empty gun.

The modest tombstone of the hired girl who lighted the fire with kerosene, and the

grass-carpeted mound that covers the mortal remains of a boy who took a mule by the tail.

The tall monument of the man who didn't know it was loaded overshadows the dug-out of the man who jumped off the cars to save a ten-rod walk.

Side by side lie the remains of the etherial creature who always kept her corset laced up to the last hole and the intellectual idiot who rode a bicycle nine miles in ten minutes.

Here reposes the young doctor who took a dose of his own medicine and the old fool who married a young wife.

Right over yonder in the northwest corner, where the gentle breezes sigh through the weeping willow that bends over his lowly bed, lies the fellow that told his mother-in-law she lied.

Down there in the potter's field, with his feet sticking to rude blasts of winter and blistering rays of summer's sun, is stretched all the earthly remains of the misguided regulator who tried to lick the editor, while, the broken bones of the man who wouldn't pay for his paper are piled up in a corner of the fence.

Near by, his grave unmarked, reposes the moldering dust of the printer who starved to death trying to run a first-class paper in a fourth-class town.

Over by the entrance reposes the boy who went swimming too early in the season, and the old lady who kept strychnine and baking powder side by side in the cupboard.

Right there in the path directly in front of the entrance, obstructing the way, is the grave of the microbe-killer who rinsed himself inside and out with antiseptic solutions until his agonies were cut short by acute softening of the brain..

The fool-killer gathers them in, one by one, and by and by we will have a pretty decent world to live in.-Exchange.

THAT "Man is a drinking animal" might fitly be embalmed with the rest of the proverbs.

As an infant his first wail is for something liquid, and as he nears the sunset of life, passing into second childhood, he again reverts to liquid food.

If there comes a time when solid food cannot be had, or he takes it into his head to ape the fasting freak, a la Dr. Tanner or his rival, the Italian, he can stave off starvation for many weeks by frequent and liberal potations of water, without which his freak experience would be very brief.

Originally he drank from springs, running brooks and pools by the wayside. Cups had not yet been invented; so he drank a la cheval, or out of his hand, or from a folded leaf. Nor were crush hats in vogue, that convenient water-scoop of the soldier in the field and the hunter in the woods. Later on he hollowed a drinkingcup from a wild gourd or the shell of a cocoanut.

Civilization has saddled him with a good many new drinking-cups, habits, fads and fashions, some of which are responsible for innumerable petty ills, and for some of the more serious and distressing of the diges

tive disturbances that have become so universally prevalent.

A brief discussion of some of these habits is certainly opportune and ought to be instructive. However, this is not to be a tirade on temperance, which has its temperate and intemperate advocates and its generally intemperate opponents. The study of the evils, ethics and economy of the indulgence in beer, wine, whiskey and the rest of the alcoholics, is perfectly legitimate, is necessary enough now, and ever will be until the millennium, but we will leave it to its own champions, its W. C. T. U. organizations and orators, its Neal Dows and John B. Goughs of the past, and its Carry-the-Hatchet Nations of the present.

Outside the nameless list of ales, beers, wines, whiskies, brandies and the rest of the brewed, fermented and distilled groups, with their thousand-and-one dilutions, modifications, fabrications and adulterations, there is a large field open to the careful investigation of expert dietists and social economists, in connection with our popular table beverages.

The annual importation of tea, coffee and cocoa into the United States will very soon if it has not already reached the as

tounding figure of one thousand millions of pounds. The American Revolution was precipitated by a cargo of tea, or a disguised tariff in the shape of a stamp tax, and a modern table without a steaming pot of some one of the stimulo-narcotic group would be like a comedy without a comedian, the tragedy of Hamlet with the part of the Dane omitted.

The five o'clock tea has become a national institution without which society would collapse and go into the hands of a receiver. It is brewed in special kettles, served on special tables, poured into special cups and stirred with special spoons. The hostess who would venture the innovation of ordinary kettles, cups, tables and spoons -even ordinary napkins-would be promptly read out of her set. Then, too, all these items of apparatus, goods, chattels and appurtenances have their brief hour of fad and fashion, after which they must be banished to the attic or donated to some fashionable charity.

Imagine an invitation to a Five O'clock glass of milk, or a Five O'clock Apollinaris, Vichy or Congress water!

Of course the tea is mostly pretense, since the silver, brass or nickel teakettle doesn't hold enough to fill a finger-bowl, and the doll teapot's capacity is gauged by thimblefuls and not by cups.

The French word café, except in connection with modifying words, no longer means a beverage, but stands for the entire restaurant; and the restaurant has resolved itself into a circle or series of tables revolvaround a coffee urn.

The average citizen would be lost without his coffee and rolls-the coffee being the drawing card-at least for breakfast, and even the shabby genteel ape their after-dinner café noir. All the hotels, eating-houses, dairy restaurants-even the most unpretentious lunch-counters-list tea, coffee, cocoa and chocolate on their bills of fare, and the varieties of the two former obtainable in any good market would fill a page of an ordinary menu. Of each of these varieties one might name a dozen sub-varieties

colored and uncolored, fermented and unfermented, sun-roasted and basket-fired, hot tea, iced tea, breakfast tea, lunch tea, five o'clock tea, and tea with half a hundred other frills.

The varieties and variations of coffee are equally numerous. Ignoring the market designations and all the different grades of the berry itself, there are café noir, café au lait, coffee, good coffee, better coffee, delicious coffee; poor coffee, worse coffee, logwood coffee and chicory, and it must be admitted that the very worst of all these may be found outside the proverbial fourth-rate boarding-house.

Cocoa and chocolate are not so popular as tea and coffee in this country, but are growing in popularity as better processes are devised for their preparation. There are scores of rival manufacturers, each claiming superiority for his processes or his product. A study of the food value, physiologic effects on the human system and the social, ethical and moral bearings of these universal adjuncts to the daily dietary on the future of the race is important and ought to be profitable.

The botanic name of the tea plant is camellia theifera, a fact that is of only incidental and technical interest in this inquiry.

A more common and at least pseudoscientific name is thea sinensis, or thea chinensis.

It need hardly be repeated that China has long been recognized as the principal seat of tea-culture, but of late years its prestige has been encroached upon by results attained in India and Japan. One of the principal varieties now being cultivated is a hybrid between a Chinese and an Indian (Assam) species. Experiments conducted within the last decade in some of our own Southern States and in Southern California have proved that tea can be successfully cultivated in this country, but not yet profitably in competition with the Oriental product, on account of the excessive cost of labor here as compared with the wages paid in Japan, China, India and other Eastern countries. Possibly the Philippines may

turn out some profitable tea-producing districts.

The active principle of tea of all kinds is called thein. Chemically speaking, this is an alkaloid, isomeric with caffein, and by chemists considered identical with this active principle of coffee. In a practical way the effects of the two substances, similar to a certain extent, are really so different that the physiologist is warranted in questioning either the accuracy or the relevancy of the chemical tests.

Thus, thein is found to possess about onehalf the toxic power of caffein. It affects cardiac movement much less, but produces more strongly marked convulsive action when pushed in the system, and also induces a more pronounced degree of wakefulness. Chemistry is therefore a lame guide in matters dietetic as well as in some other material directions. For example, the chemist can discover no difference between charcoal, anthracite and genuine diamond, whereas the veriest idiot could detect the physical differences.

In addition to the thein, tea contains about one per cent. of a volatile oil, with traces of gallic and oxalic acid, gum, wax, resin, quercitin and a very little gluten. None of these items are nutritions except the slight trace of gluten, hence, tea cannot be classed among the food products. It has practically no dietetic value. The coloring matter of tea is chlorphyl, the natural coloring matter of all green plants. In preparing green tea the leaves are cured immediately after picking. Black teas are made from the more mature leaves, which, after being picked, are piled up in heaps and allowed to pass through a stage of fermentation. This process destroys the chlorphyl and the leaves acquire their dark color. The cheaper grades of green tea are artificially colored, to make them more marketable. The coloring matters used are unquestionably injurious to health; but from the fact that they are used in very minute quantities their toxic effects are usually ignored. Tea is a tipple. It exhilarates, stimulates, "cheers, but not inebriates," according to

the old saw, and yet its devotees are as much lost without it as the dram-drinker without his toddy. Those who are accustomed to its constant use, especially those who take it strong, and who have little active outdoor exercise, become "topers" of the worst kind. There are no statistics gathered by the Census Bureau to show how many millions belong to the army of habitues, who are usually so wedded to the cup that they would surrender almost any other earthly object-even the last jot of their eternal hope-rather than forego the favorite decoction.

To these unrecognized inebriates, deprivation means a species of delirium quite as difficult to control as the mania a potu of alcoholics. They are beside themselves if for any reason they cannot have their daily or tri-daily bracer with punctilious regularity. Missing it for a single meal means a racking headache, with a long train of concomitant troubles-hysterics, heartache and the blues. The result is slow, but it is practically inevitable. The chronic tea-toper at last becomes the chronic and incurable dyspeptic. The tannin he takes in the end gets in its deleterious work. The stomach becomes leathery, the complexion takes on a coat of indelible tan and looks like crumpled parchment, while the liver and pneumogastric nerves shrivel, and make an assignment that recognizes no preferred creditors. Its victims grow prematurely old, or lapse into a state of chronic paresis, which may end in actual imbecility.

The coffee berry grows on a shrub that belongs botanically to the rubiacea, the particular variety from which the coffee of commerce is derived is known as caffea Arabica. The plant is native in Arabia and Abyssinia and has been extensively transplanted in South America, Mexico and other tropic countries. Quite recently a Liberian species has been attracting attention. It has a berry much larger than that of the caffea Arabica and may in time become a popular variety. As already stated, the active principle of coffee is caffein, and while this substance is by chemists consid

ered identical with the thein of tea and the theobromin of cocoa, its effects on the human system are quite different. Many persons can indulge freely and constantly in tea without showing any immediate disastrous effects, but cannot tolerate coffee; while others partake of coffee with comparative impunity but are upset by the use of tea. While habit has much to do with these diverse results, there is a certain percentage of individual idiosyncrasy to be considered.

The aroma and flavor of coffee do not exist in the green berry but are evolved in the form of an etherial empyreumatic oil, by the process of roasting. This oil slowly evaporates on being exposed to the atmosphere, hence its absence in coffee that has been stored or exposed for some time after roasting. In ground coffee this loss is much more rapid. Coffee contains little if any more nutritive matter than tea, but it allays the sense of hunger and fatigue, and for this reason is popularly credited with nourishing the system. Both tea and coffee lessen the waste of the body, by interfering with tissue metabolism, and in this indirect and questionable manner contribute something toward nutrition. In other words, by lessening tissue waste, the system is made to demand and require less actual nutriment since tissue material is, so to speak, made to do duty a second time.

Cocoa and chocolate are products derived. from the kernel of the fruit of a tropical tree botanically known as Theobroma cacao. In the popular mind it is often confounded with the cocoanut, one of the palm family, the two species being in no way related. It is also sometimes mixed up in the popular mind with the coca erythroxylon, from which the narcotic cocain is derived. The latter, it may be casually remarked, comes from an entirely different shrub that is native in South America. Cocoa was introduced into Europe 400 years ago, thus historically preceding tea and coffee as a beverage by a hundred years. The name Theobroma signifies "food for the gods," which indicates that those who first used and named this product held it in high esteem.

as a nutritive. Chemical analysis and the table test of time have shown this estimate to be founded on fact. On this point, however, authorities disagree, honestly no doubt, and it may be chiefly from the fact that they do not carefully sift their premises. One quotes the result of an analysis of the green kernel, another of the roasted nibs, and a third of somebody's "prepared" cocoa. As a matter of course their discrepancies and disagreements are very marked. Davis, in the face of most other authorities, asserts of cocoa that "its food value is due to the fat that it contains. The starch and proteid are too inconsiderable in amount to be of much worth."

*

Bannister gives the raw cocoa bean 50 per cent. of fat, a little more than 4 per cent. of starch and not quite I per cent. of alkaloid.

Hutchison gives analyses of the various brands of prepared cocoa, showing all the way from 15 to 33 per cent. of fat, from 4 to 20 per cent. of nitrogenous, and 40 to 71 per cent. of non-nitrogenous constituents. other than fat.

Stutzer's analyses of Holland cocoa show but 30 per cent. of fat, 20 per cent. of nitrogenous, with 37 per cent. of fibre and non-nitrogenous extract.

Stutzer and others find in the raw cocoa bean all the way from 10 to 32 per cent. of nitrogenous (proteid) matter. There is also a considerable percentage of starch, but it exists in a form that renders it difficult of solution, hence, the prevalent opinion that for weak stomachs cocoa is rather indigestible. In addition to its nitrogen and starch the cocoa, or more properly cacao, bean contains nearly 50 per cent. of fat (cacao butter), which has always been considered another reason why the beverage is too hearty for invalids and persons with weak digestion. The treatment of the cacao bean required to bring out its properties as a beverage is much more complicated than that used in case of tea and coffee. Some manufacturers remove most of the fat element, replacing it with arrow-root or wheat

*"System of Physiologic Therapeutics." Vol. VI., page 119.