Those who recall the old Westminster Aquarium with its wonderful assortment of men diving from the roof into seven-foot tanks, of acrobats shot from cannons and of young lady cycle racers—how daring their knickerbockers seemed in those days!—may remember that one attraction was a fasting man named Succi. He existed for forty days in a glass box which admitted only just enough air to keep him alive, for oxygen makes you hungry; and was guaranteed to take nothing but little soda water, We used to go and look at him in his box with the same absorbed fascination with which a crowd will watch a man digging a hole in the road. Some time after him arose Upton Sinclair, to preach the glories of fasting. He had earned fame by exposing the horrors of the Chicago meat packing, enough to make anyone want to give up eating, and we think he laid claim to ha fasted for as much as twenty days, without any other intel ruption of his ordinary habits, but, on the contrary, increase in weight and power and the get eral enjoyment of life all round, This was better than Succi, better even than the scholar's horse, which unfortunately died just as it had solved the problem of living on air. And now, in two recent numbers of the "Spectator," we have some extremely interesting notes on fasting as a cure for the ills to which flesh is heir and an account of a twenty-days' fast, with first nothing but orange then nothing but milk, and only on the evening of the twentieth day a gorge of salad and some apples, which "my teeth, after having had nothing to do for nearly three weeks felt very strange chewing."
The writer, Mr. F, Yeats-Brown, begins' with the modi remark that "I feel sure I have no particular right to life, 7 deserve to exist, if at all, by virtue of compliance with' natural laws." No doubt true of us all, but how many of ni bother about them?—Animals obey these laws: when sick, they refuse to eat. "But man, the superior animal, allows son to replace instinct with astrous results." Says Mr.
In the life of a mystic there comes a time when mental funetions cease, so that the voice of the silence' may be heard, So also, if Nature is to do" any healing work for you, there must be a lull in the daily round of your digestion and assimilation, You cannot concentrate with a hundred cares on your mind, nor can you cure yourself of any bodily affection on a full meal,"
Therefore, he continues, when the accustomed diet fails to keep you in health stop eating. Nature will tell you when to begin again.
"Fast, Give your digestion a rest. The chocolates, the. Viqueurs, the pork pies, the pur-natives you and T have taken our wild lives, wore all dietetic crimes, Expiate them gracefully and gladly. Eliminate the toxins they "have generated. Let your heart beat slower; it will beat more strongly too, Wash your kidneys, Give Nature time to tidy up the debris accumulated of your For seven days he ate nothing but oranges and on the second day, his diary records, "I feel disinclined for concentrated thought. The full moon is gor-geons but looks rainy." These Dhenemena, one reflects, are not confined to a diet of oranges. On the eighth day he was promoted to milk, and the following entry indicates that Nature was already well ahead with her healing work:—seized the glass and hurried back with it to my room, where
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.