Nature's treasure-house is continually yielding up new secrets that are for the healing of nations. By wise application of these medical science has added within half a century five and a half years to the average of human life. She has other, and what may be classed among open, secrets that even sensible people are slow to comprehend and to use to the advantage of the race. Fondness for drugs and ignorance of the laws of health usually go hand in hand. The reader of "The Mill on the Floss " recalls as a stroke of genius sallow Mrs. Pullet's mournful pride in the fact that no other woman in the parish had swallowed such quantities of doctor's stuff as herself. In proof of which distinction she points to the empty bottles and boxes on the shelf, and regrets that, "as for the boluses there is nothing to show for them without it is the bills."

Every parish has its Pullets - the wife who doses herself with physic, and the husband who "draws" his drugs "mild," by keeping medicated lozenges in his mouth. But for them the patentees and pedlers of panaceas could not build palaces and drive four-in-hands. Even conscientious members of the profession devote more thought to remedial than to preventive measures. We must go to the antipodes to find a spasm of sense that pays the family physician for keeping his charges well, and stops his salary as soon as one of them becomes a "patient." The American practitioner in good and regular standing who makes much of " kitchen physic " is rated as old-womanish. The best of the guild are more ready to say what the sick ought not to eat than to advise what well people should eat, and when and how, if they would keep well.

I know a woman who would be handsome but for growing obesity, and a red muddiness of skin that defies alterative drugs, mineral waters, and cosmetics. Her physician lately prescribed walking in the open air for an hour each day.

"Walking ! " cried the perplexed patient. "I do little else. I walk miles every day of my life. I know nobody who walks more unless it be our letter-carrier."

The pedestrian's friends whisper among themselves that she is "a high liver," addicted (the word is not too strong) to gravy-soups and entrees, teeming with indigestion; to fat ducks and salmon and lobster ; to rich puddings and sauces; to pastry transparent with butter ; to strong coffee, chocolate, nuts, raisins, confectionery, and so-called digestive liqueurs. Such things, when indulged in freely and habitually, will not down for all the medicines in the Pharmacopoeia, and even bodily exercise profiteth little, although taken in the life-giving air of heaven.

In the good time coming doctors will league - not with druggists - but with greengrocers and butchers. Prescriptions for juicy steaks, tender chops, fish, full of phosphates for bone and brain, and fresh vegetables, will take the place of mystical scrawls ordering quinine, calisaya, antipyrin, phenacetine, the various bromides, hydrarg. cum creta and myriads of other mineral and vegetable poisons. Manuals of Domestic Medicine will be discarded for familiar treatises upon Dietetics and the Chemistry of Food.

As a means to this end and the health and longevity of our race, each house-mother should study what kind of food will most surely build up the systems of growing children and maintain the vigor of adults. It sounds harsh, but it is a harsh truth, that thousands of people in otherwise fairly comfortable circumstances throughout our land suffer, and that many actually die yearly, from malnutrition. Their stomachs are distended tri-daily with what passes for food, but it is not food convenient for human creatures.

The table is the first objective point of economy when economy becomes necessary. "We must live more plainly," signifies a cutting off and a shutting down upon provision bills. Salted meats and fish are substituted for fresh; canned fruits and vegetables are cheaper in all seasons than those newly gathered, and are purchased by the family caterer as a matter of principle. In farming districts, peopled by fairly prosperous freeholders, "butchers' meat" is a novelty in home bills-of-fare, being reserved for high-days and holidays, and the slaughter of a fowl for home consumption is an event bordering upon a solemn ceremonial. The barrel of pickled pork, the keg of pickled fish, the store of smoked beef and hams, the bins of potatoes, turnips, and cabbages, supply with dreary monotony the family table from October until June, when new potatoes, turnips, and cabbages "come in." Eggless rice-puddings and leathery apple-pies, on five days out of seven, fill up the chinks left in disappointed stomachs by the solids enumerated. The quality of home-made bread in these households leaves so much to be desired that the sawdusty loaves left semi-weekly by the neighborhood baker are a welcome variety.

From this class of a rural and religious population, and from the corresponding rank of city mechanics, clerks, and small housekeepers, is recruited the largest constituency of doctors and apothecaries. Butcher and greengrocer rate them as indifferent customers. These are the buyers of fowls at twelve cents per pound when the market-price is sixteen cents ; of equivocal fish and Saturday bargains in berries and peaches that cannot be kept over Sunday, and ought to have been sold on Friday. The purchasers will tell you honestly - and patiently, being, as I have said, religious - that they cannot afford choice cuts and fresh vegetables and fruits; furthermore, that their children must be brought up frugally to prepare them for the lives of working-people. They have but one idea of more palatable and nourishing food than their own, and that is, that it costs more money.

Talk of broths, rich in delicious nutriment, that may be evolved from coarse lean meat and cracked bones and a handful of vegetables; of cereals, any one of which, when properly cooked and eaten with good milk, is a breakfast in itself for hungry, growing children ; of methods of cooking tough poultry and joints that mellow tissues and keep in the juices which are the life-giving element of the meat; of the genuine economy of buying firm, ripe fruits in their season instead of manufacturing leathery pastry and tasteless puddings - is thrown away upon the feminine Bourbons of the American kitchen. They receive into credulous ears, and alas! into good and honest hearts, the plausible periods of patent-medicine venders, and estimate the family doctor's skill by the number of prescriptions he leaves, or the drugs he compounds in their sight.

The head of such a household told me the other day, with melancholy complacency, that his doctor's bill last year was $250. He added pridefully that "having had so much sickness in the family he and his wife had considered it a duty to be as economical as possible," and that the butcher's meat for themselves and five children had not cost $50 in twelve months. The sallow wife subjoined, with a sickly smile, that she "mostly lived on tea and toast. Seems 's if meat went against my stomach." Tea and toast go as naturally together with the weaker vessels among these sufferers as corned beef and cabbage with those of stronger physical mould. It is difficult to decide which is the more unholy combination. Tea and dry or buttered toast as certainly generate acid in the stomach as corned beef and cabbage defy gastric juices and irritate the mucous membranes. Good meats, vegetables, and fruits at any cost are less expensive than the doctor and druggist, who try to repair the evil-doing of indigestible food. Excellent materials, badly cooked, are an outrage to natural laws; poor materials are made intolerable by poor cooking. The result gained will be worth all the expenditure of time, money, and thought on the part of the house-mother who, by attention to this vital subject, learns to feed her family aright. The higher physical education of the nation begins in the nursery. In carrying it forward through childhood, youth, and maturity, the mother is a whole "faculty "in herself. Hers are the hands that are to throttle the serpent of National Dyspepsia.