USEFULNESS AND HURTFULNESS OF COFFEE.

Since coffee possesses the quality of stimulating the nervous system, it is a matter of course that in many cases its effect is rather injurious. Phlegmatic people, especially, need coffee, and they are fond of drinking it; for a similar reason it is a favorite beverage in the Orient, where its consumption is immense. But to persons of an excitable temperament the enjoyment of coffee is hurtful; they ought only to take it very weak. With lively children it does not agree at all, and it is very wrong to force them to drink it, as is often done; while elderly people, who are in need of a stimulant for the decreasing activity of their nerves, are right in taking as much of it as they choose.

In households of limited means it is often customary to use succory with coffee. We do not pretend to pronounce this, if taken in moderate quantity, hurtful; but we do say, that it is a poor substitute for coffee, and that there is nothing in it to recommend its use. A far better mixture is milk and sugar, and there is good reason for it; both milk and sugar are articles of food. Milk contains the same ingredients as blood, and sugar is changed in the body into fat, which is indispensable to us, especially to the process of breathing. Having taken no food through the night, the loss our blood has suffered during sleep by perspiration, and the fat which has been lost by respiration, must be compensated for in the morning. For this, milk and sugar in coffee are excellent. It is good for children to have a taste for sweetened milk, or milk-coffee, in the morning. We must not find fault with them if they like it. Nature very wisely gave them a liking for sugar; they need it, because their pulse must be quicker, their respiration stronger, in order to facilitate the assimilation of food in their bodies, and also to promote growth. Not that adults need no sugar; but the sugar necessary for them is formed from the starch contained in their food. For this purpose the digestive apparatus must be strongly developed; with children this is not the case; therefore they are given sugar, instead of the starch to make it from. Many diseases, particularly rickets—prevailing mostly among the children of the poor—are the consequence of feeding the child with bread and potatoes; these contain starch it is true, but the digestive apparatus of children being yet too weak to change them into fat, the result is that the flesh falls away, and the bones grow soft and crooked.

But he who, to promote digestion, takes coffee immediately after dinner, does best not to use sugar or milk; for both, so far from helping digestion, are an additional burden to the full stomach, and disturb its labor more than the coffee can facilitate it.

It is very good to take wheat bread for breakfast. Wheat has nearly twice the quantity of sugar and starch that rye contains, and it is besides easier to digest. And as it is our principal duty in the morning to replace as quickly as possible what we have lost during the night, it is a matter of importance to give the stomach such food as is both nutritive and quickly digested.