. For it has turned out, that when the Continental
navvies live in the same style as their English competitors, they
presently rise, more or less nearly, to a par with them in efficiency.
And to this fact let us here add the converse one, to which we can give
personal testimony based upon six months' experience of vegetarianism,
that abstinence from meat entails diminished energy of both body and
mind.

Do not these various evidences endorse our argument respecting the
feeding of children? Do they not imply that, even supposing the same
stature and bulk to be attained on an innutritive as on a nutritive
diet, the quality of tissue is greatly inferior? Do they not establish
the position that, where energy as well as growth has to be maintained,
it can only be done by high feeding? Do they not confirm the _a priori_
conclusion that, though a child of whom little is expected in the way of
bodily or mental activity, may thrive tolerably well on farinaceous
substances, a child who is daily required, not only to form the due
amount of new tissue, but to supply the waste consequent on great
muscular action, and the further waste consequent on hard exercise of
brain, must live on substances containing a larger ratio of nutritive
matter? And is it not an obvious corollary, that denial of this better
food will be at the expense either of growth, or of bodily activity, or
of mental activity; as constitution and circumstances determine? We
believe no logical intellect will question it. To think otherwise is to
entertain in a disguised form the old fallacy of the perpetual-motion
schemers--that it is possible to get power out of nothing.

Before leaving the question of food, a few words must be said on another
requisite--_variety_. In this respect the dietary of the young is very
faulty. If not, like our soldiers, condemned to "twenty years of boiled
beef," our children have mostly to bear a monotony which, though less
extreme and less lasting, is quite as clearly at variance with the laws
of health. At dinner, it is true, they usually have food that is more or
less mixed, and that is changed day by day. But week after week, month
after month, year after year, comes the same breakfast of
bread-and-milk, or, it may be, oatmeal-porridge. And with like
persistence the day is closed, perhaps with a second edition of the
bread-and-milk, perhaps with tea and bread-and-butter.

This practice is opposed to the dictates of physiology. The