THERE is a tendency in the ordinary appetite-governed mind to continually question the integral value of natural foodstuff, and the adequacy of unadulterated nature to sustain human life. In our staggering conceit we undertake to improve upon Nature's output, and to introduce food-substitutes for her evolutionary processes. Thus with perfect disregard for natural balances we undertake to extract, separate, chemicalize, conserve, preserve, concentrate, dilute, sift, distort, extort, acidify, saccharinize and alkalize the products of Nature, - interrupting in a thousand ways the intelligence, order and law manifested in every natural process, inside or outside the human organism. With unreasoning boldness we proceed to break up and disorganize the infinite poise and balance contained in the natural compositions of the grain, the fruit and the vegetable, and to substitute them with the haphazard and capricious combinations introduced in the food-market as shortenings, oil and butter substitutes, "health-foods," promiscuous dressings, "constipation foods," sterilized flakes, "branita-biscuits," "crimps," "granose," "gluten" and a host of other innovations in which the manufacturer sports with life, juggles with nature, artifices the true, and naturalizes the artificial ; shatters with a fool's audacity the marvelous results of Nature's profound efforts, in order to change and to rearrange them with no other guidance than a crude, vulgar, vitiated sense of taste.

One of the most inconsiderate and harmful innovations in the realm of "health-foods" is the introduction of putrifying bac-cilli into natural milk to serve as food for human beings. A perfect food in itself, we have in milk an extraordinary vehicle by which the vital principle of nature transmits its constructive energy into the human organism. For what is milk but the emulsified form of living "tissue salt" - constructive elements in organic nature, biologically standardized and biochemically poised through its vital association with water, which is the cradle, nursery and laboratory for the first manifestation of organized life upon this planet. This diffusion of a structural and creative substance into the universal solvent and primitive supporter of all organized life, has made of milk an indispensable food for every creature of evolution, whose age and condition renders it too feeble for the more concentrated and coarser cell-structure of animal or vegetable food-products. Hence milk is the logical and self-prescribed food for all infantile, sick, enfeebled or senile forms of life.

Now to introduce the action of "bacillus Bulgaricus" into this pure and vitally uncon-taminated element, is as unscrupulous as to thrust a scorpion in place of bread into the face of the hungry. Milk occupies the highest plateau of organized life; the bacillus its lowest. The former vitalizes, energizes, construes; the latter breaks up, disintegrates, destroys. The one, under the aid and guidance of oxygen, sunlight, electricity, vital magnetism and inter-etheric associations, carries on a continuous advance on the ladder of evolution toward ever higher levels of life and power, the other, as an agency of dissolution, fermentation, alcoholization and acid-ulation, brings in the night-side of nature, with its issues of disorganization, degeneracy and death.

The stupendous blunder of introducing such a remedy in the realm of human therapeutics has its sole explanation in the hurry of our present age to take things and phenomena on their surface or face value without examining the deeper effects they produce on the organism. A glass of whisky, or a shot of morphine, may produce all the evidences of increasing vigor and strength; but the strength is departing from the system in place of entering, representing the situation of a spendthrift, who, no longer satisfied with the income from his yearly interest, proceeds to improve his finances by checking on the principal itself. The "Bulgarized" milk concoction, by the very virtue of its poisonous character, becomes a stimulant to the system, while the latter in order to neutralize the alien attack is compelled to call upon the vital reserves for assistance - a process which always starts a great flush of systemic invigoration.

The advocates of the "Bulgarized" milk theory claim benefit to be derived from the bacillus itself on the basis that this bacillus is supposed to attack the systemic bacterial acids, from which most individuals are found to be suffering. As these acids, however, arise from gastric and intestinal fermentation, due to error in food combinations, the only rational method to remove them from the system, is to eliminate from our diet such indulgences in food and food mixtures, as have caused them - a method which is certainly superior to the introduction of fresh poison in terms of the "Bulgarized" milk, and take chances on the outcome of the fight between the two offenders. The theory is that the putrifactive bacillus of the "Bulgarized" milk is able and willing to destroy the putrifactive bacillus of the domestic brew - the "enemy of our own household." But in order to proceed with any scientific accuracy however, it must be first ascertained whether in a given individual case, the bacterial acids of the system represent the type which can be successfully dealt with by the bacteria of the laboratory-microbe culture. If not, this culture will attack the living tissue of the individual and start a process of promiscuous and entirely uncalled for reductions of the invaded organism. In the case of a fat and sluggish subject, the first effect often shows surface symptoms of great improvement, but if the attack should be waged on the system of a highly organized, super-sensitive or neurasthenic individual, the results invariably are unfavorable, and may often lead to serious nervous breakdown. In either case the ultimate effect is disastrous, as the system must not only furnish the battle ground for the bacterial offensive, but also pay for the vital energy, destroyed tissues and nervous shock, involved in the encounter. Pathologically considered the system is practically under martial control, and may remain so indefinitely, while held in demoralizing vassalage by the alien invaders. Humanity pants for life, not for death; for advance towards higher forms of organized energy, not for a descent into the low levels of fermentation and putrifaction - the maggots and vermin, fungoids and nondescript, destructive agencies of a microscopic underworld.