The Pensacola journal. (Pensacola, Fla.) 1898-1985, 1912-03-13

| viii quicker their mouths and risk
cholera by eating green apples. The
| morbid desire for the strong acid
grows out of the perfectly natural and
! healthy desire for less sharp acid; ;
but the desire being thwarted grows to
| unhealthy proportions. The way to
keep children from eating green apples
| is to give them plenty of ripe, tart
fruit.
Meat Diet and Vesetsrianism.
Children often are great meat eaters.
Nervous, intense children have a ire
mendous craving for meat. Do their
parents ask themselves whether this
craving has any sense in it or not? No!
they merely deny it, assuming that too
much meat is bad for children. Now,
| let us see about this.
The degree of energy which can be
cbtained from any food depends direct
| Iy upon the nutritiveness of that food.
| You can, as the vegetarians say, get
as much nutrition from wheat as from
meat; but You cannot get it cut of the
tSame bulk. All vegetable food is less
compactly nutritious than meats are.
1t requires much more bread than meat
to give the same energy, and still more
potatoes.
The child's stomach is a little thing.
To stuff IL with the most bulky OF
foods is not the part of wisdom, for
then the stomach must work very hard
lin order to extract from that mass the
Iamount of nutrition required to keep
Iup heat, repair energy and growth.
The Vegetarian Animals.
Think for moment of the noble
lcow, a creature often held up for our
Admiration by enthusiastic vegetarians
IT is true that she extracts from the
grass of the fields good meat and
III g Il
ishe gives her whole mind to it, and al
most her whole body. Her legs are
| just barely long enough and strong
| enough to carry her to the best feeding
places; her neck muscles are just suttl-
cient to maintain her heavy head in
the proper feeding posiuon. She sell
| dom filings it high in order to look
about her, as the well-fed horse does
| Her brains are dun and sleepy. The
j whole force of her economy goes to the
management of her many stomachs
and her great abdomen. Look at the
| shape of her!-a great bulk of diges-
tive apparatus swung between four
short posts. This is what a creature
becomes who is forced to extract nour-
| ishment from so innutritious sub
| stance as grass.
| Compare the cow with the horse. The
horse, to be sure, eats vegetable foods,
but foods in which more nourishment
oats and beans and corn-the recep-
tacles in which the plant world has
packed away concentrated nourish-
ment. And 10! he has at once more
fire, more strength and more intelli-
gence than the COW.
The dog, again, who eats nothing but
meat, is still livelier and more intelli-
gent. The horse gives up much of his
I time and much room in his anatomy
to digestion, the dog scarcely more
than does the human being.
| The next time a circus comes to
town notice the difference in the ami
mails in the menagerie. The strict
lvegetarians, such as the CRATES, the
camels, the emus, the gnus, etc, are
all dreamy looking, Gocile creatures,
each with a large digestive apparatus;
while the fiesh-eating creatures, such
as the lions, tigers and wolves, are so
full of fire and energy, even in their
confinement, that they pace restlessly
about their cages. That these differ
lences are not merely due to the special
constitution of these animals is proved,
as Herbert Spencer remarked, by the
fact that the same animal will change
his disposition and appearance, accord
ing to the kind of food administered to
him. The grass-fed- horse, for instance,
becomes sag-bellied and loses muscle
and speed. Recent experiments in the
feeding of mich cows show that an or
binary COW richly fed on bran and
grains will often give more milk, and
a better quality of milk than a reg
istered Jersey COW fed chiefly on hay
and grass.