what he had been doing. Prejudiced as he was, he fully expected to have the doctor declare that he must stop everything he had been eating and use only some of his own patent health foods.

To his surprise, the doctor remarked, when he had finished his account:

"Well, Professor, I think you're doing pretty well: you've corrected through your own experience some of your specialist friend's food errors. But I don't think your trouble is mainly one of diet."

After years of concentrated effort on diet, this was somewhat disconcerting.

"In Heaven's name, what is it, then?" "Why, there's a wrinkle in your vest." The professor was a dignified man. And this was a life-and-death matter for him. His first prejudice grew more acute. His vest was wrinkled, but—

the posture that produces a wrinkle in the vest causes such a strain when these dilators and contractors are called upon for their work that after a time they may relax. The result may be a tremendous settling of blood in this whole region, giving rise to a condition when tuberculosis and many other ills find a field prepared for them.

"All your symptoms," said the doctor, "can be explained by the fact that too much of the blood in your body was down there. You can't wonder your brain refused to work when it wasn't getting enough blood supply."

He manipulated the professor a few minutes, and then "tapped out" the offending organ again. "I've reduced your liver half an inch," he announced. "You should wear a belt I'll give you for a

"If I were to examine you, I'd find a wrinkle underneath in your abdomen." "Well, what of it?"

"Moreover, I could put my finger right on four sensitive spots on your spine."

"This is pretty big talk," thought the professor, more and more convinced that he had made a mistake in coming at all. However, he consented to an examination.

"I don't know yet," he confessed afterward, "whether all the gentleman told me was correct or not. But I'll swear to one thing: he did find three sore spots on my spine which I didn't know about. There was no mistake about those, the instant he touched them."

"Your liver is enormously enlarged remarked the doctor, as he "tapped out" that organ. "It's pretty clear what your main trouble is."

BAD POSTURE, BAD LIVER

He went on to explain that the portal circulation-the great vein and its system that carries blood between liver and stomach-is capable of holding practically all the blood in the body. When a man holds himself erect there is a steady pressure of the flat abdominal muscles on these blood vessels which prevents them from filling up too much with blood, thus automatically controlling this reservoir; but

which will straighten matters out, till you learn how to stand and sit once more."

All this seemed a bit cocksure and sudden to the professor. After that black six years it was too much like a get-richquick scheme.

REBORN IN A WEEK

"See here, Doctor," said he, "suppose I do all you tell me: how long ought it to be before I see signs of improvement?"

"Oh, you ought to feel a lot better in ten days," returned the other casually. "And in six or eight weeks you should be able to do twice as much work as you've been doing."

There was a gleam in the professor's eye. "I'll try it out," said he. At least this was one of the humbugs that could be "nailed" at comparatively small cost of time or money.

He went home. He followed instructions exactly, finding little relief from the belt, but much from the pressure and gravity treatment and the strengthening exercises. In a single week he felt literally as if he had been reborn. He kept at his schedule. In a month he looked back and found he was doing double the amount of work through which he had been painfully dragging-and doing it easily.

That was ten years ago. The professor became what my friend Dave calls a "bug"

on hygienic living: he found out by careful tests on himself a great many things about food, air, exercise, and "poisons." He declares that as a result his capacity for work has steadily increased throughout this decade. He has been writing an important book a year in his own special line, besides dozens of articles, monographs, and pamphlets; he is an active member of a score of learned societies, and the moving spirit in any number of public health efforts. Indeed, it is said that most of the important health work in America centres in his library through his connections, influence, and enthusiasm. Certainly all the facts pass over his desk, either before, or as soon as, they are facts.

Yet you may spend a whole day with him and talk of many absorbing things without detecting the least sign of strain or hurry. He is handling this large and complicated network of interests without any wear of the bodily or mental machine. All because he made one previously neglected adjustment of the bodily mechanism and stood up straight!

Here's another, about "The District Attorney Who Came Back."

There is a physical director in charge of one of the big city Y. M. C. A.'s whose special job has become to repair manhandled human machines. Some years ago he had a call from a famous district attorney. The man was in the clutches of neurasthenia. From the brilliant, dashing lawyer who had made a national reputation, he had dropped to a nervous invalid, afraid of everything, ready to quit. "Doctor, I'm through," he said. "Is there any hope for me?"

Anybody who knew the man in the least needed nothing but this question to comprehend what he had been through.

The director questioned him, examined him, cheered him up, got him enough encouraged to make an effort.

THE VIRTUES OF PERSPIRATION

He started in on a schedule of half time at his office, the rest at a system of carefully planned exercises. It had probably been years since that man had been in a good healthy sweat from muscular exertion. He had perspired only in Turkish

The D. A. was accustomed to m good living-and innumerable cigare lighting one after another with that vous haste which is far more a sig trouble than the cause of it. But t cigarettes were stopped and he down to one cigar after lunch and 2 more after dinner.

Presently he was started at golf. A two months he began to take part handball competitions with as much for the game and for winning as he shown in his political career.

And at the end of three months he in better physical trim than he had bee in thirty years, as full of fight and ener as ever and so well launched on a sensit habit of life that no further special car was needed.

I have an idea there are at least a millice men in the cities of the United States to day who could take some of that prescription with advantage.

CURED BY COURAGE

In those already prehistoric days when the New York subway was being built. there was a young fellow whose job was to collect money for the Y. M. C. A. He was a good collector, energetic and effective.

There was an epidemic of typhoid fever about that time in the section through which the subway ran, and along with some distinguished members of the Four Hundred, young E. contracted the disease

It was a bad case. When he recovered there was only half of him left-75 of his 155 pounds had dropped off along with his nails and such accessories. The poor chap looked like a feebly animated skeleton.

Neither his strength nor his weight came back. For a whole year his temperature stayed above 100, his pulse at 110. He went away for a short while, but it did no good. One doctor after another declared he had tuberculosis and his one hope was

to get to a sanitarium: he kept on till he found a doctor who said he didn't have it --and decided he'd believe that one.

He tried all sorts of wild things-including a hydropathic cure in which he took icy baths in mountain streams, but temperature and pulse continued their abnormal state. Indeed, he became such an interesting "case" that at one time he had three or four doctors taking daily records of these matters. "But," says he, “it made me so nervous after a while to see that indicator in the bulb jump up that I cut all that out."

Presently neuritis set in, with that torturing pain which it produces. It started in his neck. After a while it went to his arm: that arm became useless. It dropped to his foot: he couldn't walk.

too, the many Job's comforters who felt it their duty to warn him against the fatal optimism which hid from him the fact that he was dying of consumption; and in his dispiriting boarding-house he decided that, just as far as he could, he was going to live a normal life.

Each day he would make an effort to go to work. Sometimes he'd get to the office, sometimes not; but always next morning he'd start at least. Some days he'd work a couple of hours; occasionally he'd be able to put in almost a full day.

The other men in the office admired his pluck, helped where they could, cheered him on; and he stuck grimly to his job.

He had no theories of diet, but selected what food he found agreed with him from the boarding house table; he took no exer

"Well," said the doctor, "there's just one thing certain: you can't live if you stay in New York. There may be a chance for you if you go to Nassau, in the West Indies."

There wasn't any neuritis in the youngster's grit.

"I'm not going to Nassau," he declared. "I'm going to stay in New York. And I'm not going to die, either."

The doctor hadn't stopped being a man when he became a great specialist. "By Jove!" said he. "If that's the way you take it, stay-and come to me any time, night or day, and I'll see you through.

doctor who told him that any man who would be hurt by a couple of cigars a day was hardly worth keeping alive anyhow, so he held to this moderate tobacco comfort; he slept with his windows wide open; he had never used alcohol in any form.

"I just used a little horse sense, and made up my mind I would get well, and meanwhile did my work."

It was slow: for years he suffered from drenching night-sweats, never going to bed without two hot-water bottles, and with codein tablets beside him.

Then one day he ran across a book called "The Efficient Life." "I got another slogan from that book: 'Pick out the important things and let the rest slide.""

So he set out to do one really important thing every day, or every week, as he was able, and to think of that alone, and get the satisfaction of it.

This proved a rock foundation for his daily life: it gave him hope and that proper pride in accomplished work without which mental health is not.

All these years he had a perfect obsession that if he could only gain weight (he had finally come back to 110 pounds) he'd be all right again. His dieting produced no special results, but at the end of three years he found himself gaining in strength a little. There followed a period almost more trying than the first black days, for each slight improvement would be fol

lowed by a relapse into his former weakness. The intervals of betterment grew longer and longer, however, and his courage was by this time proof against anything.

At the end of six years E. found himself a well man once more. That was ten years ago. He has been doing a full man's work happily ever since, and his confident power as he tells the story is a striking object lesson of the fact that makes most difficult the adequate use of what science has learned about health, namely, that a man's physiIcal welfare is largely in his own hands.

SOME BIG MEN WHO RECOVERED

I could go on indefinitely with these tales. There's the case of two of the best known business men in the United States, conducting vast manufacturing and advertising campaigns, who came to a sanitarium in a pitiable state of nervous prostration and found that all they needed was rational food and exercise; the manager of one of the largest New York clubs. who has worked out a scheme of life that takes care of these necessities while keeping his place in the city rush; the proprietor of one of the biggest hotels in Atlantic City, who takes his vacation each year by spending several months with the man who first showed him how to live; the exPresident who lost eighty superfluous pounds by diet and exercise, to the prodigious increase of his working powers; and so on, longer than you would read.

Diseases of the digestion, of the circulation, and of the respiratory system are responsible for more than four times as many deaths as tuberculosis of the lungs. And these are mainly the results of wrong living habits, of maltreatment of the bodily machine. Indeed, the life insurance companies have recently shown that the death rate from diseases of the heart, arteries, and kidneys have almost doubled in fifteen American cities during the last thirty years. The increase in the total registration area between 1900 and 1910 was 19 per cent. Arterio-sclerosis has increased 250 per cent. in ten years, diabetes 50 per cent. in the same period. Yet during the same period this rate has been stationary or declining in most countries of western Europe.

Although we have enormously increasec the chance of life in infancy and yout! the man of 40 or 50 has to-day fewer year to live than his father had, and man. fewer than his grandfather.

MORE CHILDREN, FEWER GRANDFATHER Chronic diseases, which are, as Dr. J. H Kellogg says, "a home product," kill about 600,000 people every year in the United States-and though wonderful work 1 being done by government, state, and city health boards in controlling the acute d eases, these largely preventable and unnecessary results of wrong living are increasing steadily. A recent careful study too, of conditions in New Jersey led to the belief that mental defectives have absc doubled in number in the last generation And it has been repeatedly pointed out that along with other highly civilized countnes our proportion of centenarians is rapidl decreasing from the former 1 in 25.000which is only one eighth as large as in Bul garia, for instance. At the other end of the age scale, although improvement in milk supplies has reduced infant mortality by one third, there seem to be as many children born with innate defects of constitution as there were half a century ago Witness the remarkable figures presented by Dr. Thomas D. Wood, of Columbia University, showing that of the 20,000,000 children in the public schools:

One million have flat feet, spinal curvature, or other deformities sufficiently grave to interfere with health.

One million have defective hearing. Five million have defective vision. Six million suffer from malnutrition. Ten million have defective teeth. Six million have adenoids, enlarged tonsils, or cervical glands needing attention.

Fifteen million children have physical defects sufficiently grave to require attention and seriously to threaten health. usefulness, or even life in later years.

THE PENALTIES OF SPEED

The meaning of this is, of course, that we have radically altered our living habits in the last century. We are paying the cost of one-sided fast living, of speeding our

bodies and minds without adjusting them to the increased strain on the one hand, and the lack of proper activity on the other. No sensible person expects Society to go backward; but it would seem like common sense to know enough about a mechanism to fit it to the demands upon it. One expert figures that 60 per cent. of the people in America whose ancestors were engaged in outdoor work, or in work calling for muscular effort, are now indoors and working day after day without enough physical activity to put them into a perspiration. Even the mechanic watches a machine, the trainman's brakes are set by air, the farmer rides a sulky plow, everybody telephones or takes a trolley. And at the same time the ends of the earth are scoured for new foods, all the resources of science are drawn upon to put before us a table of luxuries such as our forefathers never dreamed of.

Just consider the simplicity of the methods which changed the men spoken of above from hopelessness to health: no surgical operating, no drugs, nothing but the a b c of hygienic living.

One trouble is, of course, what a famous hygienist calls the "low ideal of health" which satisfies the average man's ignorance. "I have a very intimate friend," said he, "who is suffering from diabetes," (which by the way kills almost as many people as typhoid fever). "I've frequently seen him when his hand trembled so that he couldn't raise a cup of coffee without spilling it: he'd have to bend over and drink it from the cup in the saucer. Yet when I was telling him my experi

at the sanitarium, he remarked: 'Yes, Blank's a good man and that's a wonderful plant he has. If there was anything the matter with me, I'd go there quick.""

Most people who come back from a month or two in the woods realize that they do not know ordinarily what it is to be well, to have real control of their vital forces. And because the human body is the most adaptable and long-suffering mechanism of which we have knowledge, they get along somehow and are content that it is no worse.

Consider the situation one moment:

Here you are in supreme control of what has well been called an "industrial plant," a congeries of elaborate mechanisms, employing subtle mechanical, chemical, and electrical processes, all working together to produce that complex miracle of human life. Have you ever spent an hour finding out whether you are running this delicate machinery intelligently? What would happen to a motor-car or a lawn-mower that was handled as most human machinery is? Yet a type-setter or a steam hammer or the most intricate mechanism used by man is simplicity itself compared to the human body.

Take just one point: it would be a stupid motor-car owner who waited till something went radically wrong before having adjustments and circulation and valves looked over. But it is only comparatively recently that the idea has been applied of examining a human being before he shows signs of trouble. Probably, too, not one out of a hundred readers of this ever heard of the first organized effort along these lines, the Life Extension Institute. This movement is aimed primarily at the individual: it offers him, first of all, for a small fee, the facts about himself; and then the laws of hygiene as formulated by a Reference Board of a hundred of the most distinguished physicians and sanitarium and laboratory workers. Ex-President Taft is the chairman of the board of directors, Prof. Irving Fisher heads the Reference Board, and General Gorgas is the consultant in sanitation.

We have all learned of late years that it pays to go to a dentist once or twice a year, before a tooth begins to ache; how much more worth while to use the blood pressure, auscultatory, and other tests devised by modern science to find out in advance the tendencies or weaknesses which may cause trouble later! For it is possible nowadays to detect hardening of the arteries, Bright's disease, diabetes, and so on, months or years before they manifest themselves to the individual affected; and the chances of cure or amelioration are, of course, immeasurably increased by this advance knowledge.

This is the big new principle of health: find out your sickness before it happens.