another direction than in defective sensibility. It is, in fact, but a forecast of that immunity to suffering prognosticated by our Saviour as being the exclusive privilege of Faith-" And these signs shall follow them that believe... they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them" (Mark xvi.).

The tortures that frail maidens and honourable women, young men and ancient fathers, endured unflinchingly in the martyrdom of the early Christians and in the succeeding ages of religious persecution, testify to the reality of this sublime insensibility to acute physical pain, when it is allied to a corresponding degree of spiritual exaltation. At the present day the Mahommedan dervishes, the Hindu fakir, the Brahman devotee, the American medicine-man, and the negro fetish priest possess to a great extent this indifference to bodily agony, when under the influence of psychic excitement. In cases of amputation women are found to possess recuperative powers far in excess of men, and are in this respect more akin to children, who from five to fifteen bear operations better than adults. As a rule also, women, like children, are cheerful and hopeful in illness; and in face of even dangerous maladies and surgical operations retain their elasticity of spirit.

On analysing the relative physical and aesthetic functions of the senses, it may at once be admitted that taste and smell may be ranked as the lowest, and the ones exclusively originating in the animal nature of men. Taking the sense of taste first under consideration, it is freely acknowledged that it was one of the greatest factors in raising man from mere animalism, savagery, and barbarism, to the first grade of civilisation. The man who cooked his food was ages in advance of the savage ancestor who ate his raw. From the natural pangs and arbitrary dictates of hunger sprang the desire to supply their need, to sow the grain for bread, to plant the trees for fruit, to rear the best of the flock for meat, to make the hearth (the first indication of home) to cook the coveted meal. Appetite therefore suggested agriculture, husbandry, pastoral pacific occupations, and social amenities. And in these various avocations primitive woman was the chief worker. She was always the chef-de-cuisine, the bread-maker if not the breadwinner of humanity. She formed the nucleus of the home, of the family life.

Appetite uncurbed has, however, proved one of man's most

fatal snares, contributing in no small measure to the ultimate dissolution of all heathen civilisations. The lust of appetite ruined in turn the Greek and the Roman, and as we note the development of Christian civilisation, we are confronted by this undeniable fact, viz., that the tendency of the present age is towards a greater temperance in all things, simpler fare, and a frugal table. And foremost in this movement are women, whose simplicity of diet is the subject of universal remark and satire. "A woman," sneers a cynic, can always

exist on a cup of tea and a penny bun."

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Little possibly does the author of this sarcasm realise that therein is disclosed a strange, and it may even be said, a mysterious, evolution of the race. It appears probable, that as man's intellectual and ethical faculties develop, so the lower instincts will gradually disappear. Gluttony and intemperance are incompatible with high mental qualities, and our greatest thinkers have been abstemious and simple in their tastes. The lower senses are held in subjection, and are made subservient to the higher, as man brings his intellectual powers more into play. And this is by no means to be considered a sign of degeneration, but simply the outcome of a natural law, by which the true balance is maintained-considerable development and progress accomplished in one or more directions, necessitating a readjustment of the physical forces in another. If the race gains intellectually and spiritually it will lose in proportion of its animality and materialism.

Now it has been said, "The cook never starves"; but primitive woman knew better than to take the tit-bits from any dish she prepared for her lord and master. She had literally to be content with the scanty crumbs that fell from his table. Therefore, I take it, the acknowledged abstemiousness of women, their sparseness of diet, their general temperance in things pertaining to mere appetite, is the natural evolution of a long, an unprecedented long period of repression, of selfdenial, of keeping under strict control the animal appetite. Women, from the first, had not to consider how much they could eat, but how little; and moreover, from the earliest time, it has been considered a greater disgrace for a woman to be a drunkard and a glutton than for a man to indulge in gastronomic excesses.

"If once you find a woman gluttonous, expect from her very little virtue; her mind is enslaved to the lowest and grossest temptations."-Johnson.

At the present day, if it were not for the habitués of clubland and male epicures, the chef-de-cuisine would find his occupation gone. The highest lady in the land partakes of one dish and a milk pudding at her principal meal; and her example is the rule among countless numbers of her women subjects. Even among the greatest male epicures, gourmands and gourmets, quantity no longer tickles the palate; quality is the standard by which a delicacy is judged. No woman, it is said, is a competent judge of wine; and though tea is supposed to be the favourite feminine beverage, the tea-tasters in the trade are invariably men. Men have unquestionably retained or acquired a greater piquancy and delicacy of taste than women, who, in a majority of cases, are actually indifferent to its pleasures.

It

This distinctive trait in women coincides with one of the varied aspects of the theory of the survival of the fittest. is plain that, if the gloomy prognostications of Malthus are fulfilled, the persons who, by physical training and inherited frugality, can live upon least, will be the survivors in the battle for food in a world over-densely populated. The problem how to exist upon next to nothing many women have already successfully solved; and here, again, a purely natural taste, peculiarly feminine, has lately been scientifically proved to be one of the greatest factors in producing muscular power at the least possible expense. Women are often taunted with their inherent love for sweet things; they are the greatest consumers of sugar in the world; and lo! science reveals that the effect of sugar on the system is of the greatest importance as regards muscle energy and prevention of fatigue. I will here give in full the investigations on this subject by Dr. Vaughan Harley, 1894: "During a twenty-four hours' fast on one day, water alone was drunk; on another 500 grammes of sugar were taken in an equal quantity of water. It was found that the sugar not only prolonged the time before fatigue occurred, but caused an increase of 61 to 76 per cent. in the muscular work done. In the next place, the effect of sugar added to the meals was investigated. The muscular energy producing effect of sugar was found to be so great that 200 grammes added to a small meal increased the total amount of work done from 6 to 39 per cent. Sugar (250 grammesabout eight ounces) was now added to a large mixed meal, when it was found not only to increase the amount of work done from 8 to 16 per cent., but increased the resistance

against fatigue. As a concluding experiment, 250 grammes of sugar were added to the meals of a full diet day, causing the work done during the period of eight hours to be increased 22 to 36 per cent." Also, only recently, investigations at the instigation of the Prussian War Office have been made, by means of a special apparatus, into the question, whether the consumption of small quantities of sugar rendered the tired muscles capable of renewed exertion. "When a very large amount of muscular work had been performed it was found that a greater quantity of work could be got through on the days when the sugar was given. The blood had become poor in sugar, in consequence of the severe muscular effort which had previously been gone through, and hence the administration of a comparatively small quantity of sugar had the effect of producing an increased capability for work" (English Mechanic, July 1897). En passant, I may remark that this curious fact explains in some measure the extraordinary development of muscular power in the negro races, who are abnormally addicted to sugar, and every variety of sweetened food. But it more conclusively gives the reason for the sustained existence of the poorer sisterhood, incessantly toiling for a mere pittance in the midst of the highest civilisation; and who are able, with attenuated and underfed frames, to keep body and soul together for varying lengths of time under the hardest and most exhausting conditions of life. Nature unerringly points out the best and easiest obtainable nourishment at the least possible cost; and as the weary toiler sips her weak and over-sweetened cup of tea, she is actually taking the best revigorator for her debilitated frame that the most recent scientific research could devise.

And again, how remarkable to the thinker, and to the believer in historical evolution, is the indisputable intervention of Providence to secure the ultimate supremacy of the AngloSaxon race, Free Trade has for half a century made sugar cheaper in Great Britain than in any other market in the world, and within the reach of the poorest of the inhabitants.1 From her sugar-producing colonies alone, England can obtain an unlimited quantity of that commodity. It is said Queensland could produce sufficient for the consumption of the world. As Science advances, it appears probable that at no very

1 The annual consumption of sugar per capita in England is sixty pounds; in France and Switzerland it is twenty-six pounds; in Germany it is eighteen pounds; while in the United States it is forty-four pounds.

distant date, artificial chemical preparations will supersede many natural products. The consumption of masses of food will be reduced to the consumption of essences; man will renew his physical powers with highly concentrated articles of diet, giving the greatest amount of sustenance in the modicum of space and bulk. Women, to this consummation, will long have paved the way. Physicians tell us that more persons die from over-eating than from starvation, and that a large amount of the severest forms of disease proceed, especially among the well-to-do classes, from over-indulgence at the table. Hygienists fully concur in this opinion, and have moreover proved by observation and experiment the disastrous results on the physical organism of ill-chosen and non-nutritious food. Investigation tends to prove that a considerable portion of the daily food is required for brain work, but in what proportions and of what nutrients remains yet to be definitely discovered; the day, however, may not be far distant when the income and out-go of the body, and the sources of intellectual activity, will be accurately gauged to the great benefit of the race. There is further, beyond the acknowledged temperance of women in matters appertaining to the natural cravings of appetite, and their evident limitations in the sense of taste, a higher and most pregnant theory admissible, namely, that as man evolves from, the purely animal to the higher spiritual nature, the lower carnal senses, which in his barbarism he shared of necessity and to his advantage with the brute creation, will gradually become dormant and eventually non-existent; while in their place will be developed faculties of a much higher and (at present considered) supernatural order.1 In the ancient religions and in the principal extant faiths of the world, this supreme victory of the spiritual nature of man has always been impressed upon the believer, by precept, by ritual, and by

1 "It is upon a fresh period of spiritual efflorescence and nearness to the unseen that, according to Maeterlinck, we are entering to-day; a period in which the dominion of the soul will expand, and it will stand revealed in all its strange strength. . . . The promise of this spiritual renaissance is to be seen on every side, not only in the general revolt against materialism, and in the renewed attention bestowed upon occult laws and upon all spiritualistic phenomena, such as magnetism, telepathy, and levitation, but also in the most modern of music, in the pictures of certain artists, and in a new and nascent literature, the summits of which are illumined by a strange glow."-Virginia M. Crawford, Fortnightly Review, August 1897.