ist pause for a moment, but only a moment, for do they not contain acid also ? Certainly, carbonic acid, and behold another nail in our coffin! In his despair he cries aloud that "the acidulous habits of the body mark a stage in civilization," this golden Victorian era is an acid age, an age of puckerings, of wry faces, of sour stomachs. So terrible is the prospect that his reason well-nigh totters on its throne, and he detects the deadly traces of sourness in the smell of things, nay even in

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... e very sound of words. The innocent term "ascetic," for in¬ stance, which to uninitiated ears has almost a note of sanctity, becomes to him phonetically full of deadliest significance. "The modern fashionable women are ren¬ dered not only somatically but also psychologically ascetic," we are assured, and the prophecy closes with this awful threat of doom, that " the coexistence of somatic and psychologic asceticism can no longer be ignored!" And to think that this fearful fate is hanging over all of our ignorant heads and we can not even grasp what it means when we are told in plain English. Would we fain know just how are these tons and oceans of acid ingesta to produce their harmful effects? By "reducing the alkaline bases and salts in the fluids and tissues of the economy," and as "the alkalinity of the blood is the measure of its germicidal capacity," one can easily see what terrible things may happen. What makes the situation so serious is that with the obstinate short-sightedness characteristic of mere theorists, all our psychologists assure us that the vegetable acids, including acetic, are promptly con¬ verted into alkaline carbonates, that all fruits and