ercury in the
thermometer was at 90 deg. While here, I ate twelve ounces of dry bread
and two apples a day, and drank nothing. Yet I perspired as freely as ever,
nor did I perceive any difference in the quality or the quantity of any
other secretions or excretions."

The reader will take notice that Mr. Robinson's principal or starvation
experiment, lasted five months, or one hundred and fifty days. He will
also observe that he left off the experiment with nearly or quite as
much flesh as he had when he commenced, and with a very great increase
of muscular strength.

The above statement was so remarkable, that not a few medical men and
others regarded it as a hoax. "To live on three ounces of bread, and yet
be in daily employment," they said, "even though such employment were of
a kind likely to call for very little muscular effort, is altogether
incredible. And what renders the whole so much more unlikely, is, the
yet more extraordinary assertion, that, part of the time, he gained more
in weight than the whole amount eaten and drank."

It was no wonder that medical and all scientific men were staggered at
the account. I was in doubt myself, in regard to the functions of waste,
and made a very rigid examination, in order to be certain of the facts,
before I ventured to publish any thing. On one or two points, I
afterward obtained Mr. Robinson's particular statement, as follows:--

"In regard to the question you propose, I shall have to guess a little.
So far as the fluids are concerned, however, I think it was about half a
pint a day. The solids--for I weighed them this morning, and they appear
to me about equal to those voided during the experiment--are fully half
a pound."

I also recently ascertained another curious fact. Mr. Robinson's
eyesight, prior to the experiment, had, for many years, been very poor,
but was perfectly restored during its progress. It appeared, also, that
he had again resorted to the exclusive use of bread and water for food;
but not in such small quantities as before. Mr. Robinson, of course, is
now above sixty years old.

One medical correspondent of the _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_,
pressed Mr. Robinson, very hard, for corroborative testimony concerning
the facts just stated, to which Mr. Robinson very kindly replied, by
sending him the certificate of his wife, Mrs. E. D. Robinson, whose
veracity is undoubted. The certificate was as follows:--

"The most of the facts which m