om fermentation or putrefaction of their contents, Wealth would
flee from the coffers of our purveyors, and the Boards of Health would,
or rather should, take a hand in the matter. And these same purveyors,
by the way, why do they care more for Wealth than for Health, their own
and ours? But why are we all of us so neglectful of Inner cleanliness
and so careful of Outer? The receptacles of the inner man reek with
augean filth, and we cleanse them not. The immortal fountains of Health
and Happiness are dammed, blasted and degraded by just this neglect of
our imperative duty; the duty of furnishing full opportunity for the
functions of replenishment and life, _by keeping the sewer passages
clear_.

Are a sour stomach and foul intestinal canal fit receptacles for food
and liquids? When our receptacles are in this condition, why do we add
more material for the generation of poisons of the ptomain and
leucomain classes, and morbid gaseous elements? It has been
demonstrated that during fermentation an apple will evolve a volume of
gas six hundred times its own size. What folly then to add to the
fermenting mass! Food taken under such conditions will produce results
not hard to imagine.

The gases that are commonly found in the stomach and small intestines
are carbonic acid, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen; while, besides all
these, sulphureted and carbureted hydrogen are found in the large
intestine, causing in a normal state the necessary and useful
distention of the alimentary canal. The writer has long regarded the
abnormal production of gaseous substances in the intestinal canal from
putrefactive changes as of itself not only a grave menace to health,
but as a condition productive of morbific results of which we have
still much to learn. The more or less constant and excessive distention
of the whole or even of a part of the intestinal canal by gases is a
serious condition, affecting as it does the various organs of the body,
not only through the absorption of these gases into the general
circulation but also through the reflex nervous reaction of these
organs. It is astonishing what amount of mechanical force is exerted by
the gases in the intestinal canal. They distend not only the muscular
walls of the intestines and stomach but the strong abdominal walls as
well, until the clothing worn has to be loosened for ease and comfort.
This more or less extreme mechanical pressure may account for many
cases of hernia, prolapse