Chapter VII
FRAGMENTATION

    THE factors of a diet upon which it is now believed life depends will perhaps one day be as many as the notes of a piano. At present there may be said to be thirty.

    There are, firstly, the proteins or meaty substances of the food. They have been found to consist of chemical substances called amino-acids. There are eighteen amino-acids known to chemistry. Some of them are necessary to life. Lysin and cystine are necessary; tryptophane is almost certainly so; arginine and histidine, one or the other, but not necessarily both, are so. That gives four factors necessary to life.

    Then there are fats and certain lipins they contain. They occur in all foods except sugar and some fruits. To what degree they are essential to life it has not been finally determined, so one factor for fats is sufficient.

    The same may be said of starches and sugars, or carbohydrates, to give them their group name. Carbohydrates are the immediate fuel of energy, and fats the stored fuel. Energy is an essential quality of life. Carbohydrates can, then, count as one factor.

    These food substances are composed of chemical elements. Of the elements known to exist in the body, some, possibly all, are necessary to life. They are carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, potassium, sodium, iron, copper, manganese, zinc, magnesium, lithium, phosphorus, sulphur, chlorine, iodine, barium, silicon. They add eighteen factors and raise the total number to twenty-four.

    These elements are not only combined to form proteins, fats, carbohydrates, but they also form the mineral salts of the body, the chlorides, phosphates, carbonates, sulphates and so on, of sodium, potassium, calcium, iron, and so on. We will not add anything for the mineral salts, but allow them to be grouped under the eighteen elements.

    Another set of substances necessary to life are the vitamins. Vitamins A, B1, B2, C, D are necessary to life. There are other vitamins, buds, as it were, from B called B3, B4, B5, B6, also E and somewhat nebulous vitamins up to K. It is safe to say that five vitamins are essential to life.

    Lastly, there is water, which brings the total number of dietary factors necessary to life to thirty.

    These necessities have been found out by giving animals diets in which one of the factors was missing. If the animals did not die, the factor was not necessary to their lives. It might be necessary to their health; they might live feebly without it. They might get a particular disease without it. This led to a further mass of research on these particular factors of disease. Then there have been experiments to find out which of two or more factors of like type was the best. Thus a great deal has been learnt about a factor or group of factors as separate things.

    Let us take, for example, the proteins or meaty foods. The first protein to be isolated and separated as a thing or substance in itself was gelatin. Gelatin, therefore, became the object of a great deal of nutritional research.

    Firstly dogs were tested out on gelatin, as the only protein of an otherwise complete diet, by Voit, over fifty years ago. But gelatin failed to fill the full protein reeds, and the dogs got thinner day by day. There was something lacking in gelatin as a full necessary protein food.

    Proteins build up and replace the tissues of the body and supply the necessary element, nitrogen. Gelatin failed to do this on its own. It could do it in part, but there was a gap in its completeness.

    When it was found that proteins were made up of amino-acids, this gap proved very useful to the research workers. By putting a particular amino-acid into the gap its efficiency could be tested.

    Kessels, in 1905, tried the first of these experiments. Dogs, Voit found, starve if given gelatin as their only source of nitrogen. Kessels gave dogs gelatin plus such amino-acids as tyrosine, cystine, and tryptophane. The dogs lived. He then fed himself in the same way, and found he could carry on quite well. So the gap in gelatin was successfully filled.

    By experiments like this the amino-acids were eventually ranged in order of value. Some failed to fill the gap, and the weight of the dogs continued to be lost. Some succeeded, and prevented the loss. With growing animals, some succeeded better than others in filling the gap, as shown by the normal increase of weight. In this way an order of merit of the amino-acids was created.

    From the separate amino-acids it was easy to pass to the separate proteins. There are so many of them in the vegetable and animal worlds and they vary so much according to how many amino-acids they contain and how they are arranged that work on this subject could be endless. Berg, for example, in 1903, calculated that the number of possible proteins, based on the amino-acids, was 6,708,373,705,728,100. So research workers were driven to test out the best known ones.

    There is a chart in McCollum and Simmonds' book which is quite exciting in its effect. It is like the start of a horse race. Nice thick black lines, indicating the weights of experimented rats, leap forwards from the base line into the air together. The rat that leaped highest was not quite a fair starter, being given two proteins, those of rye and flax-seed meal, whereas the remaining rats were only given one protein-containing food in a made-up diet. The next starter, not much behind the rye and flax-seed candidate in his leap was milk-fed. Then came wheat, rye, maize, flax-seed alone, barley, oats, and Kaffir corn-fed rats.

    By experiments of this kind the proteins can be arranged in order of worth; in the same way as McCarrison arranged the whole diets as prepared and eaten by the Sikhs, Pathans, Mahrattas, Goorkhas, Kanarese, Bengalis and Madrassis. By the former experiments you find out which are the best, or probably best, proteins for a diet which you are putting together under expert advice; or which, as an expert, you will advise for others. It settles for you one factor of diet, the proteins.

    There are the many other known factors to be considered, as well as the need to keep a watch on new discoveries. The vitamins, for example, first appeared some forty years ago, when Eijkman of Batavia published the results of his investigations on the paralysis of fowls fed on polished rice. They have led to a great increase of knowledge. They are by no means the end. There are "countless substances in food," Sir Gowland Hopkins wrote in 1906. There must needs be other important unknown factors yet to be discovered.

    Meanwhile, experts can tell us what happens to animals and humans who do not get sufficient vitamin A. The most dramatic is dry eyes, leading to blindness, but if fresh vitamin is quickly given there is a miraculous recovery. Or there are the troubles which do not clear up miraculously, but yet are due in part to defective vitamin A. Such are colds, bronchitis, pneumonia, and weakness of the bowels. So one has to keep a watch on one's supply of vitamin A.

    Vitamin B effects miracles no less wonderful. There is nothing more dramatic in nutritional research than a common experiment which was often carried out in a laboratory where I worked. A pigeon deprived of the needed vitamin B by being kept on polished rice is lying on the floor of its cage, unable to rise. It may be contorted in a remarkable manner, bent right backwards, like one of the living croquet hoops in Alice in Wonderland, or forwards as if doubled up between two invisible hands. It may suddenly be released from these spasms only to be thrown into violent convulsions. It is near to death and will in fact soon die if left.

    But if one takes a glass tube, puts into it the pulp of some sprouting pulse or grain, prises open the pigeon's beak, and blows the pulp down its throat, the miracle happens. In a very short time the pigeon is its usual self, on its perch and preening its ruffled feathers.

    No experiment can persuade the onlooker more convincingly of the power of a vitamin than can this one. That is because it is dramatic. But these are many forms of ill-health due to poor supply of B which are not at all obvious.

    Then there is vitamin C. Animals and men deprived of vitamin C get into the most deplorable condition with foul, bleeding mouths, bleeding elsewhere and eventual death--the terrible disease of scurvy. This is an easy disease to prevent. It is very rare to see it now, but minor degrees of the scurvy condition, with its weakness, headaches, poor appetites, affected gums--they are common. Moreover, vitamin C is not like the other vitamins. They are, like common salt and other substances, not notably altered by ordinary heat or storage. But vitamin C is. It is volatile and unstable in character. It is, therefore, apt to be deficient in a diet which varies according to the supply of things in season, and most urban diets are like this.

    So we could continue with further vitamins, and if desired make another procession through the mineral salts, giving details of the astonishing amount of experiments there have been and information gathered on each several part of our food.

    We learn what are the best proteins, what the best fats, the best carbohydrates, the best sources of calcium, phosphorus, iron and other minerals, of vitamin A, vitamin B, and so on, until we are or should be able to select our diet, not by taste, as we do in a restaurant, but by knowledge. We shall in this way do our best to fulfil the wish expressed by McCollum and Simmonds, namely, "the discovery of the means of making nice adjustments in a qualitative way among all the factors best adapted to promote optimum development."

    The method of proceeding to the optimum development by fragmentation, that is breaking up of food into its several elements and by experiment discovering a great deal about each fragment and then putting them together in a better way, is a method that could only spring out of certain conditions. It could only spring from disease, not health. If our diet gave us health we should not question it. But it does not do so. On the contrary, there has been so much disease in the last one or two centuries that we began to question many things as possible causes of the ill-health. Amongst them we questioned our diet. In doing so our scientists have taken it to pieces as a machine is taken to pieces, and carefully examined each piece as regards its suitability. They have fragmented it, and now the time of synthesis approaches, the putting it together again. Here, however, they are far much less certain than they were in fragmentation, which continues to possess them, with the consequence that each fragment gets boosted as occasion arises; we are told to eat more potatoes, eat more fruit, eat more home-grown meat, drink more milk, drink more beer, take more salt or less salt, be careful to take milk for vitamin A, green vegetables for vitamin B, fresh fruit for vitamin C--all well-studied fragments, but fragments nevertheless.

    All this knowledge would be quite useless to the Hunza people. They have, for long, found a diet that is "adapted to promote optimum development." They have formed it out of foods not widely different from European foods, for, as McCarrison says in the Cantor Lectures: "Things nutritional are not, in essence, so different in India and in England."

    The chief difference is that they have a settled traditional diet into which they are born and a settled traditional way of growing it and caring for it. They have a whole system, a diet as a whole thing, whole not only in itself, but in its history, its culture, its storage, and its preparation.

    And with their whole diet they preserve the wholeness of their health. This also we have failed to do. Our health or wholeness has fragmented no less than our diet. A swarm of specialists have with the invention of science settled on the fragments to study them. A great deal is found out about each several disease; there is a huge, unmanageable accumulation of knowledge, and this and that disease is checked or overcome. But our wholeness has not been restored to us. On the contrary, it is fragmented into a great number of diseases and still more ailments. We have lost wholeness, and we have got in its place its fragmentation with a multiplexity of methods, officially blessed and otherwise, dealing with the fragments in their severally.



Chapter VIII
THE CAUSATION OF DISEASE

    SIR EDWARD MELLANBY, in his book, Nutrition and Disease, quotes experiments he undertook with Dr. A. H. Green designed to prove that ill-fed rats were very liable to infections.

    The diet which he gave them was a laboratory synthetic diet so prepared as to show what happens when one kind of food is defective. In this case the defective fragment was vitamin A.

    Although the diet was not a whole diet, such as certain groups of men eat, nevertheless the results are of great interest in showing how this particular faulty diet can be the primary cause of a large group of diseases. Mellanby states that Green and he found areas of infections in almost all the ninety-two young rats brought up on this diet.

    These areas of infection due to the same cause were very varied in character and situation. One rat would have something wrong with its ear, another with its stomach, another with its bladder, and so on. So different were the infective conditions found that one is not surprised that a practical man would roughly give each a separate cause. Actually 44 per cent of the 92 rats had something wrong with their urinary organs; 24 per cent with their ears and noses; 38 per cent with their eyes; 21 per cent with their stomachs and intestines; and 9 per cent with their lungs.

    These abscesses and infections only occurred in the rats if they were given defective vitamin A; if given proper food, they did not occur. Mellanby's words are: "If a source of vitamin A, such as butter, cod liver oil or egg yolks formed a part of the diet, infective lesions were never seen in the rats, the addition of these substances to the deficient diets; unless the animals were too severely infected, generally resulted in rapid improvement and ultimate cure."

    These experiments upon an important fragment of diet exhibit correspondingly a part of the results of McCarrison's Coonoor rats when fed on the poorer Bengali and Madrassi diets. The rats of Coonoor got all these infections and a good deal more, as we have seen. But Mellanby's results show, in the same way as McCarrison's more extensive experiments, that in the infections of rats fed with deficient vitamin A the primary cause of the infections is shifted from the microbes to food. As a primary cause of these diseases the position of the microbes was undermined. Something deeper in causation was found.

    The diseases of 2,243 Coonoor rats, and some other animals used at Coonoor, must here be repeated. They got diseases of the respiratory system, adenoids, pneumonia, bronchitis, pleurisy, pyothorax and infections of the nose; infections of the ear; infections of the eye; dilated stomach, growths, ulcer and cancer of the stomach, inflammation of the small and large gut; constipation and diarrhoea; diseases of the urinary passage, such as Bright's disease, stone, abscesses, inflammation of the bladder; inflammation of the womb and ovaries, death of the foetus, premature birth, hemorrhage; diseases of the testicles; inflammation of the skin, loss of hair, ulcers, abscesses, gangrene of the feet and tail; anemias of the blood; enlarged lymphatic glands, cystic and suppurating glands; goitre and diseases of the special glands; wasting, enlargement of and inflammation of the muscle, and inflammation ofthe outer lining ofthe heart; inflammation and degeneration of the nervous tissues; diseased teeth and bones; dropsy; scurvy; feeble growth, feeble appetite, weakness, lassitude, and ill-temper.

    "All these conditions," said McCarrison, in the Cantor Lectures, "these states of ill-health, had a common causation: faulty nutrition with or without infection."

    One wonders whether, with the exception of plague, these small animals could get any more diseases than those of this formidable list. I do not know if anyone has discovered how many diseases rats can get, but they cannot be expected to get all the diseases of the more complicated man. Nevertheless, one cannot assert that poor food so breaches the barrier to disease of rats that every disease which they get can swarm into the stronghold of their health, as invaders swarmed into a medieval city when the walls had been breached, to destroy it in a number of ways and scattered localities. But one can say that a great number of the rat's diseases do so, or in other words that poor food in rats is the primary cause of a great portion of disease in them.

    In minimising this astounding, but in a sense obvious, conclusion, one could say that what is true for rats is not necessarily true for man. That, as a fact, is what Sir John Orr in Food, Health and Disease (1936) does say about the rats of Coonoor: "Such experiments with rats, of course, do not carry the same weight as observations of human beings."

    This criticism is particularly interesting because it follows, not only a brief precis of McCarrison's work, but also one of a valuable, similar and later experiment of Orr's upon rats fed upon "the average diet eaten by a working-class community in Scotland (with its) daily variation, thus mimicking the food habits of human beings." There was, however, a small addition to the quantities of milk, as the rats could not be bred without the larger allowance (Journal of Hygiene, Vol. 35). The results were in the main similar to those of McCarrison.

    Now, the noticeable thing about this criticism is that Orr fragments the experiments of both McCarrison and himself. It separates the experiments upon rats from the observations of human beings.

    In actual fact McCarrison's experiments were preceded by and due to observations upon human beings. The men were observed first and then the rats. Orr's experiments were due to the example of McCarrison and observations of the unsatisfactory state of the Scotch working-class. III-health was transferred to rats by men's faulty food. Without the observations of men the experiments would never have been undertaken.

    The criticism shows the hold fragmentation has upon the mental habits of scientists. Orr no sooner reaches McCarrison's truth by his own experiment than he separates himself from it owing to this habit.

    A further comment might be made, namely, that the food would never have had such a full effect if the healthy rats had not been cleanly and airily housed and enjoyed sheltered lives, even though these conditions were also those of the sickly rats.

    Air, or rather oxygen, it can rightly be maintained, is a part of the food. When the human being is in the womb, oxygen is not separated in any way from the other elements of food, but is brought with them by the mother's blood. It remains a food after birth, but it has peculiar importance in assisting at so many vital processes of movement and energy that it has constantly to be sprayed into the blood by the special apparatus of the lungs.

    Hence the airy cages of the rats of Coonoor were a healthy asset, but that is all. They did not save the sickly rats. Further, a number of animals do not live in the fresh air. They go out into it for their food, but they live in burrows and holes. The rats do. So in effect do the Hunza in two winter months. But they also go out into the best of air.

    As to sanitary hygiene, that of the Hunza could not compare with that of the rats of Coonoor.

    The inescapable conclusion is that in a very large number of diseases faulty food is the primary cause. The suspicion is that faulty food is the primary cause of such an overwhelming mass of disease that it may prove to be simply the primary cause of disease.

    Up to the present day, it seems, the medical profession and the public have had to be satisfied with a fragmentation of causation, that is to say, a very great number of secondary causes and often enough no real causes at all, but causes as fictitious as they are popular.

    For the purposes of illustrating and emphasising the really immeasurable importance of this contrast, if correct, let us take some few of these illnesses and put their causes as given in medical text-books and as shown by the rats of Coonoor in allignment.

    Let us first take that dangerous disease, pneumonia. Pneumonia is due to a microbe, the pneumococcus, which is found in masses in the lung in true lobar pneumonia. The pneumococcus, says the text-book, is a resident of the human mouth. It is found in 80 to 90 per cent of normal, healthy individuals. Something more, then, than the mere presence of the pneumococcus must be the cause of pneumonia; something that makes this domesticated microbe suddenly become dangerous. In other words, the pneumococcus cannot be called the primal cause of pneumonia. Something has to precede it--some weakness of the barrier.

    The weakness of old age is given first of the orthodox causes in the text-book. That beloved physician, the late Sir William Osler, whose famous text-book is now under the competent care of Dr. Thomas McCrae, called pneumonia rather charmingly "the friend of the aged"--saving them "the cold gradations of decay."

    Pneumonia is more common in cities than in the country and in males than in females. Any weakening habit, such as that of over-drinking, becomes a cause, and also makes the microbes more lethal. Yet robust men may be attacked. Cold is a cause if it weakens, but not if a man finds it a tonic and reacts to it. A previous attack makes a second attack more probable. Another illness, such as chronic kidney or heart disease or one of the acute infectious fevers, gives opportunity to the pneumococcus. So also pneumonia may follow a blow on the chest.

    Now let us place these causes from text-books in juxtaposition with that of the "small universe" of Coonoor.


CAUSES OF PNEUMONIA

TEXT-BOOKS

    Weakness of old age.

    Debilitating habits.

    Exhaustion.

    Chill.

    Previous attack.

    Some other illness, chronic or acute.

    A blow on the chest.

    Pneumococcus microbe.

COONOOR

    Faulty food.


    The text-books' causes are all more or less of one kind. They may be called secondary weaknesses.

    Old age, for instance, is a secondary weakness. Old age was not permitted to the rats of Coonoor. They were allowed to live by the terms of the experiments to the comparative age of forty or fifty human years, but not to seventy or ninety. But the Hunza confront old age, not with illnesses, but with a vigour that is more like that of youth. We have recorded Skrine's account of their Mir playing polo with skill and activity when nearly seventy, and Schomberg writes of him, when about seventy-five, as being consoled for the death of his Benjamin through a gun accident by other "olive branches" who had happily appeared.

    Of debilitating habits, the text-books put alcoholism in the first place. The Hunza, about 1880, when Biddulph wrote his Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh, were, he said, "great wine drinkers,"' and an affront to more orthodox Moslem neighbours, who did not drink at all, and may well have exaggerated the Hunza habit. But at no time were they drunkards. That would be impossible in their precipitous country. McCarrison speaks of them as very moderate in their drinking.

    Exhaustion was and is also unknown in Hunza in the meaning it has in the text-books. For example, Schomberg's attendant's horse was stolen. The owner "went after it and kept up the pursuit in drenching rain over mountains for nearly two days with bare feet." There is no hesitation in these sort of acts. Their physique is ready, their apprehension of exhaustion practically nil.

    Chills, too, cannot play a part in Hunza life as extraordinary and debilitating effects. They endure the winter and its gales at 8,000 feet. Schomberg tells of a Hunza who used to make a hole in the ice on either side of a broad pond. He dived in at one hole, swam under the ice, and came out at the other for enjoyment.

    Previous attacks of diseases, the existence of chronic disease of the heart or kidney, or acute infectious diseases, cannot play much part as causes of other illnesses, such as pneumonia, where disease generally is rare. A blow on the chest may also be put aside.

    Summing up the text-books' causes, one may call them a number of added weaknesses to an inferior barrier against disease. The barrier gives way readily at this or that point. In other words, the barrier has degenerated.

    By his skilled science man is actually able to get a partial picture of what this barrier is. It is in fact an actual barrier. It can be seen through the microscope. It can be seen if it looks healthy or degenerate. It can be photographed, and the photograph of a healthy barrier has clear outlines and demarcations and that of a degenerate barrier is blurry. This barrier is the fine skin which lines the tubes and cells of the nose, windpipe and bronchial tubes, of the mouth, throat, stomach and small and large gut. This fine interior skin is much the same as the outer skin of the body, only it is thinner and softer. But both have an outer layer of cells called epithelium, and it is the epithelium that can be particularly well seen under the microscope. It is the epithelium that forms the visible barrier and which shuts out microbes and other intruders. It does not by any means form the whole barrier, but it constitutes a part of it, which can be seen as clear and definite or blurred and indefinite, according to whether it is itself well or ill fed. The contrast picture gives anyone with even a little knowledge of the microscope a good idea of what can be termed the barrier, or more accurately, the first line of defence. It is not fiction.

    So we can understand how it is that faulty food can stand alone under the heading Coonoor against the juxtaposed textbooks' list of the causes of pneumonia. It can be placed there as primary, and thereby able to make all the causes in the text-books possible; it can activate them. Without it they would be inert.



    Now let us look at the common infection of the middle ear. Mellanby found this infection in a fifth of his faultily-fed rats. It was common among the ill-fed rats of Coonoor, but absent in the well-fed. On the other hand, a well-known text-book, such as Politzer's Diseases of the Ear, does not mention faulty food as a cause, any more than faulty food was mentioned under pneumonia. That the whole basis of modern life may be wrong and that that is why such large text-books have to be written has not as yet appeared in the text-books themselves.

    Putting the causes of acute infection of the middle ear into juxtaposed columns, we have:--

TEXT-BOOKS

    External atmospheric conditions.

    Colds in the head.

    Infectious diseases, such as measles, pneumonia and influenza.

    Sea baths.

    Nasal douches.


COONOOR

     Faulty food.


    There must, therefore, in faultily fed people be a fear of cold night air, colds in the head; other people coughing and sneezing; schools where children mingle with children; bathing in the sea, and keeping off the "flu" by snuffing lotions or using nasal douches, as recommended by advertisers. Any of these things may lead to passing of the barrier and the defences of the tissues of the ear.

    The eyes are even more commonly affected by faulty food than the ears. The sickly rats of Coonoor got inflammations of the eyes, ulcers, and a particular "dry" eye leading to blindness. All of these the well-fed rats escaped.

    The text-books all accept defective food as a cause of "dry" eye or xerophthalmia, and recommend cod liver oil and butter, which will cure it if not too far advanced. With this exception there is no direct reference to faulty food as a cause of diseases of the eye. There is only the general statement that these diseases are more common among the poor and debilitated.

    A medico-surgical disease which is of particular interest is peptic ulcer, or ulcer of the stomach or duodenum. It is of particular interest because of its proven direct relation to faulty food. It happens to be very common amongst the poorer classes of Southern Travancore--so common that both Lt.Col. Bradfield, I.M.S., and Dr. Somervell asked McCarrison to put rats on the foods as prepared and eaten by these people. He put a batch of rats on the foods as prepared and cooked by the poorer folk of Southern Travancore for 675 days, and at the end of that time peptic ulcer was found in over a quarter of them. This striking result has not yet appeared in the text-books.

    As is the way of new knowledge, it passes into currency by a process of slow percolation. Until the time comes when it reaches the text-books the causes of peptic ulcer, placed in juxtaposition, appear as follows:


CAUSES OF PEPTIC ULCER

TEXT-BOOKS

    Occupation: anemic and dyspeptic servant girls, shoemakers, surgeons.

    Injury.

    Associated diseases such as anaemia, heart disease, disease of liver, appendix, gall bladder, teeth, tonsils.

    Nervous strain.

    Disturbances of the circulation. Large superficial burns.

    Certain families are said to be more liable.

    Increased acidity of the stomach.

    Several of the above in combination.


COONOOR

    Primarily faulty food.

    Specifically such food as that of the poorer classes of Southern Travancore.


    The last disease I propose to take in these few illustrations is tuberculosis. As regards this dreaded disease, McCarrison, in the Cantor Lectures, turned from his own work to one of the most remarkable of human experiments, that of the Papworth Settlement, so intimately associated with the name of Sir Pendrill Varrier-Jones.

    Papworth is a settlement for sufferers from tuberculosis, mostly in the form of consumption of the lungs. The patients are, of course, ill when they come to the settlement, but under a care, really quite like that given to the rats of Coonoor, namely, adequate food supply, good housing and ventilation and freedom from anxiety in the form of loss of employment, there are remarkable and sustained recoveries.

    All patients at Papworth have sputum pots and pocket flasks into which they must spit. The infected sputum is at once made innocuous. Moreover, public opinion in the village enforces their use by attaching shame, not to the users, but to those who dare to be forgetful.

    In Papworth there are many married couples. The children of these couples live in the settlement. They are in frequent contact with tuberculosis and are protected from the disease by the general use of the spitting pots and flasks and by good food, or, in Varrier-Jones's own words: "the child's resistance to disease is maintained by (a) adequate nutrition, and (b) the absence of mass dose of infection."

    Now comes the outstanding fact. The Papworth village has been in existence twenty years, yet not one of the children of these married couples has developed any form of tuberculosis. "Our experience proves," writes Sir Pendrill in his report for 1936, "that no tuberculosis disease need be transmitted so long as village settlement conditions of housing and employment are properly utilised. Any question of 'heredity' is now generally discredited."

    In face of this testimony to the power of resistance to tuberculosis given by good food and housing, and with spitting pots to avoid mass infection, the text-books put forward 'predisposition' as a widely-accepted medical tenet.

    The argument for predisposition or diathesis runs as follows. Nearly all dwellers in cities can be shown by careful tests to have had minor attacks of tuberculosis. The reason why some persons get the disease and perhaps succumb, whereas the majority are not aware that they have ever been attacked, is that some people have a predisposition to the disease, or a diathesis. They are born, so to speak, with an unhappy title to it, or, as the tenet is expressed by Professor Karl Pearson: "the diathesis of pulmonary tuberculosis is certainly inherited, and the intensity of the inheritance is sensibly the same as that of any normal physical character yet investigated in man.

    Infection probably plays a necessary part, but in the artisan classes of the urban population of England it is doubtful if their members can escape the risks of infection, except by the absence of diathesis--i.e. the inheritance of what amounts to a counter-disposition."

    Against Papworth's nutrition and avoidance of mass infection is set the medical dogma or tenet of diathesis, or inherited predisposition.

    This terrible Calvinistic doctrine, by which certain people, and particularly artisans of the cities, are born predestined to get tuberculosis has therefore been challenged by the good food, security, and the avoidance of mass infection at Papworth.

    The Papworth results suggest the following juxtaposition:


CAUSES OF TUBERCULOSIS

TEXT-BOOKS

    Infection with tubercle bacilli. Inherited predisposition.

    Living in dark, close alleys and tenement houses, excess of alcohol and other weakening habits. Confinement in prisons, workhouses and workshops.

    Catarrh of respiratory passages. Diabetes, kidney disease and other chronic affections which lower resistance.


PAPWORTH

    Inadequate nutrition.

    Mass doses of infection.


    If the list of the text-book is carefully examined, we see how the causes there given are all, except that of diathesis, to be found contained in the two Papworth causes. Infection with the tubercle bacilli in the one column is duplicated by the mass infection of the other. Frequent inhalation of quantities of the microbes gives greater opportunities to them to breach the barriers. All the rest are the fragmentation of "inadequate nutrition."

    Living in dark, close alleys and tenements means also faulty food. The impure air of slums means one food, namely, oxygen, being defective, but it means also that people who breathe it have not the money for foods that cannot, like oxygen, be got for nothing. Alcohol in excess destroys the appetite. So do the poisons of such diseases as diabetes and kidney disease. So does confinement in prisons, workhouses and workshops. None of the people debilitated by such places or such diseases eats heartily of good food. As to catarrh of the respiratory passages, that in itself was produced by McCarrison and also by Mellanby by faulty food. The barrier breaks down before the catarrhal microbes. A mass attack of tubercle bacilli may do the rest.

    If, then, one can put aside the predestination theory of tuberculosis, there lies one thing behind all the other causes given, and that is faulty food and, moreover, as we shall see, faulty food may account for the apparent predestination.

    That is sufficient discussion of particular diseases to show the contrast of causes. To discuss more of them would be to enter the maelstrom where diseases are regarded as separate entities, with their individual causes, each one the source of an effervescence of research.

    These Papworth children were quoted because they proved heretics to the medical tenet of predestination in tuberculosis and by implication in more than tuberculosis. They might also have been quoted as examples of the making of sound general health, for they have good barriers to disease generally, as the annual reports testify. But if their good health and freedom from tuberculosis breaks or helps to break the tenet of predestination, that in itself will be a specific triumph of almost immeasurable importance.

    Fortunately there is another triumph in establishing the general cause of many diseases and ill-healths in poor English children. With just as unpromising human material as that of the Papworth children, the late Miss Margaret MacMillan gained this success, which is described in her book The Nursery School (1930).

    The MacMillan Nursery School is in Deptford, in the southeast district of London. The school consists of two hundred and sixty children of the Deptford slums, adopted when two years old and kept until fifteen. These children are cared for in a number of ways which reflect the imaginative sympathy of the mind of the directress and the practical embodiments of which would take too long to describe. Among the methods of care is, of course, well-considered food.

    Next door to the school is "our own" Deptford Clinic for sick children. School and clinic under the one authority present themselves as human replicas of the rats of Coonoor.

    Here is Miss MacMillan's description of the food of the school. "Out all day in moving air, children are always hungry at meal-times, but no food is given between meals. In summer they have fruit from the old mulberry-tree, and we give small spoonfuls of orange juice. Fruit and fresh vegetables are needed by everyone, but especially by growing children, and most of all by children of the poorest classes in cities. Their bones are literally starved of mineral salts. They suffer from starvation in the way of nitrogenous food and of all that nature supplies in green food and fruits. Bread, bread, and always bread in surfeit is their portion. Our fresh vegetables, meal, and milk work wonders."

    The test of a diet is the wholeness of those who eat it. This is the description of the children of seven, after four years spent in the school: "They are all straight, well-grown children, and the average is a well-made child, with clean skin, alert, sociable, eager for life and new experience. . . . The abyss between him and the child of yesterday yawns deepest, perhaps, when we compare the state rather than the achievements of the nurtured child with that of the other. The nurtured seven-year-old is a stranger to clinics; he knows very little about doctors. He sees the dentist, but has hardly ever, or perhaps never, needed any dental treatment."

    To "our clinic" come the sick children of Deptford. They are just ordinary poor children who go to other schools and have other homes than hers. They present the picture of the sickly rats of Coonoor; Miss MacMillan draws the contrast, though not in juxtaposed columns.

    "There, ranged on seats by the walls, sit scores of sufferers. Blepharitis, impetigo, conjunctivitis, diseases of many kinds--these are not seen in our school. They are seen in the clinic--thousands of cases, all preventable." There follow further illnesses seen in the clinic--adenoids, tonsils, colds, coughs, bronchitis, enlarged glands, gastric and intestinal troubles--in short, the list which afflicted the sickly rats of Coonoor.

    Now both Sir Pendrill Varrier-Jones and Miss MacMillan have been exceptionally imaginative in seeing that all the conditions of life in those under their care were made wholesome, things of the mind as well as those of the body, and it is to this wholeness that they attribute the health of their wards. They do not select food as the primary cause of the health. They regard the whole as resulting in health.

    This is so reasonable that I think no one reading their results would care to diminish any one guard of healthy life which they have erected, such as modern housing and hygiene.

    Yet, apart from proofs and arguments already put forward to maintain the vital primary claim of food, there is one very exquisite human experiment made by Dr. G. C. M. M'Gonigle, Medical Offlcer of Health of Stockton-on-Tees, which strengthens this claim in a manner that may be called one of accidental finality.

    Stockton-on-Tees is an ancient market town which has grown rapidly in the last three quarters of a century and now has a population of 67,772 (1931). Of this population in that year 40 per cent of the males between fourteen and sixty-five were unemployed.

    Stockton has slums, and the Town Council recently carried out a vigorous policy of better housing. It was this that gave M'Gonigle an opportunity to exercise his excellent powers of scientific observation.

    A survey of housing needs was taken in 1919, and the largest section of the town scheduled as an unhealthy area was dubbed "Number 1 area." It was decided to demolish a part of Number 1 and transfer its inhabitants to a new upto-date municipal estate, agreeably named Mount Pleasant. In 1927, 152 families, comprising 710 individuals, were transferred to Mount Pleasant, leaving behind in Number 1 area 289 families with a total of 1,298 individuals.

    Here, then, were contrasting conditions of new and old, of good housing and slum. Naturally everyone thought the transfer to Mount Pleasant would be a betterment. But M'Gonigle watched.

    Even he, however, watched at first according to the routine of his official position. It was only when he found that something odd was happening and the expected success was not coming off, that he concentrated a keen and skilled observation upon the anomaly.

    His attention was drawn to it by the fact that the health of the inhabitants of Mount Pleasant, instead of improving or at least remaining stationary, began to deteriorate, whereas that of those families and people left behind in the slums did not.

    M'Gonigle then began to test out what was happening statistically. The standardized death-rate of the first five years following upon the transfer was 33 per 1,000; that of the unchanged slum 22 per thousand. The rate for the Mount Pleasant estate of "33.55 per thousand, appears to be extraordinary, in view of the fact that it represents an increase of 45 per cent over the mean standardised rates for the same individuals in the previous quinquennium," is M'Gonigle's comment. The increase was not due to any peculiarity of infant mortality, epidemic, or other recognized cause. It was just there steadily throughout, and it represented an increase in the various groups, from 0 to 10, between l0 and 65, and over 65. There was even an increase of one-third in still birth. It was a characteristic of the whole people of Mount Pleasant. It was "a real increase and beyond the probable extent of fortuitous variation."

    What was it due to? The better housing? It seems absurd that something better should prove something worse. Yet, in spite of the best intentions, this happens if primary things are forgotten. Man lives primarily by food, not by housing, and the food of the Mount Pleasant people was what had deteriorated.

    When living in the slums these people paid rents which averaged 4/8 a week per family. In 1998, on the Mount estate, the rent was 9/- a week, and by 1932 it had risen to 9/3-1/2 per week, or double the original rent.

    Consequently there was less money to spend on food.

    M'Gonigle worked out the average amount spent on food per individual for Mount Pleasant and for slum by carefully prepared and corrected statistics. It is obvious, in view of the different rents paid, that Mt. Pleasant was worse off. Particularly was this shown in the case of unemployed of both areas. The food per "man" per week in Mount Pleasant cost 34.7 pence, that in the unchanged slum, 45.6 pence.

    M'Gonigle was, therefore, forced to the conclusion that the deterioration of food led to the deterioration of health. "Such environmental factors as housing, drainage, overcrowding or insanitary conditions" could obviously be excluded. These secondary factors were not worse at Mount Pleasant. They were a great deal better. That was the good fortune of this illuminating experiment. The secondary things, namely, housing and sanitation, were made better first, and in making them better money was withdrawn from the individual's primary need--food.

    The experiment emerges as an indictment of putting the building of new houses and of organizing physical drill on a par or as prior to food in a policy of health. They are both good things, but they are not primary.

    Muscular energy and activity follow right feeding naturally, and physical training can follow upon the muscular energy. No one indeed disputes this proposition--except in their acts and public policies. There is a general, rather indefinite feeling that sound food is the primary cause of health, but when this shapes itself out of the mist, there appear secondary not primary, forms--good housing, hygiene, physical drill.

    M'Gonigle showed that food took the primary place to good housing and sanitation. Two experiments, now to be recorded, show how food takes the primary place to exercise and physical drill. The first is reported by McCollum and Simmonds.

    Forty-two out of eighty-four negro children, in a kindly but impoverished institution, were, as an experiment given a quart of milk daily in addition to the customary institutional food.

    Between these children and the children who were not given milk there was not only a difference of growth and health, but of desire for exercise. The non-milk children were apathetic and very tractable. The discipline of the institution was strict, and these children were all obedient. Those in the milk-fed group, on the other hand, soon caused annoyance to their teachers by their restlessness and activity and were frequently guilty of infractions of the rules.

    The second human experiment is similar. It can be found in. the League of Nations Report on The Problem of Nutrition Volume I. "A pint of milk daily added to what was considered a good diet in an institutional boarding school" was followed by the usual increased growth and decreased illness, and it was particularly noted "the children were more high-spirited and irrepressible."

    The irrepressible activity which good food provides is willingly poured out by the child or man into the many channels that are ready for it. Whether it be as work or play, exercises or drill, sports or sheer necessity, the well-nourished body is glad of the opportunity of activity. Without consciousness of weariness, except if there be lack of variety, this readiness is carried on into age or even near to the time of natural death. Amongst those of excellent physique, getting old has quite a different meaning from what it has amongst those to whom age brings weariness.

    So, when the negro and English children showed "restlessness and activity, frequently leading to infractions of the rules," or become "more high-spirited and irrepressible," one sees that more eager activity proceeds from sounder food. One sees, further, that modern urban life, with its industrial and commercial confinement, is, perhaps, only made tolerable by food that is not what the milk was to these black and white boys. The words "apathetic and very tractable" attached to the forty-two negro children who were not given milk are significant. It was food that led to high spirits and infractions of the rules.

    Climate is frequently upheld as a cause of disease or of health. McCarrison attributes some of the efficiency of the Hunza to their climate: "No doubt the climate is conducive to the health and vigour which its inhabitants enjoy."

    Anyone who has seen the perfect physique of a tiger in the heat of the jungle and, maybe also, of a polar bear in the Arctic, and has watched various races of men in different lands, most, I think, doubt the factor of climate as of great importance in physique and health. Vigorous life is widespread in a world of many climates; there are permanent rainless deserts due to lack of food, but none due to bad climate only.

    Finally, in the consideration of the causation of disease, we came to heredity.

    We have seen in this chapter that the faith of the medical profession's tenet as to the heredity of tuberculosis has been upset by such human experiments as that of Papworth, so that Varrier-Jones himself stated that the belief was "now generally discredited."

    The medical faith goes back at least as far as Hippocrates. It therefore extends over a period of twenty-three centuries. At the modern end of this enduring creed, Karl Pearson brings predestination in the case of tuberculosis into line with the work done generally upon heredity by the words: "the diathesis of pulmonary tuberculosis is certainly inherited, and the intensity of the inheritance is sensibly the same as that of any normal physical character yet investigated in man.?"

    Hippocrates was "the Father of Medicine," and Karl Pearson was up to his death, four years or so ago, the greatest British authority on the exactitude of heredity. Can it then be that this faith which has so long been endured and is so buttressed at each end is untrue? And if so, to what degree is heredity as a cause of disease generally untrue?

    If a faith has been held so long by a learned profession and yet proves false, it may be that the reason is that it itself lies within the ambit of a yet greater and more widespread human error.

    Such an error may well be that of faulty food. It may be that disease is, and for centuries has been, due to faulty food, and because food has been unsuspected, so other faiths have been built up and maintained.

    Among these other faiths may be the faith in the inheritance of disease, though it is really only the weakening effect of faulty feeding that is handed on by habit or poverty from generation to generation.

    Professor Arthur Thomson, in his well-known book Heredity (1926) answers the question he puts to himself: "Can a disease be transmitted?" with this reply: "Perhaps it is best answered in the negative," and he quotes from Professor Martuis: "A disease is not an entity nor a character, but a process--an abnormal process injurious to the organism which is set agoing by a causa externans and runs its course in some part of the body. In the sense in which inherited is used in biology there are no inherited diseases."

    An external cause is necessary.

    Certain blemishes and peculiarities are undoubtedly inherited, recurring again and again in one family. Examples of these are: having odd fingers or toes; albinism with whitish hair and pink eyes; peculiar movements and mental weakness coming on in middle life, restricted to a very few families and known as Huntingdon's chorea; or the strange inability of the blood to clot, called hemophilia, which is handed on by unaffected females to their sons.

    Nevertheless, there is danger in one's parents. One may be born with a general weakness, and therefore tendency to diseases, due to them.

    The hereditary elements are lodged in the sperm cells of the male and the egg cells of the female. Their clusters can be seen under the microscope. There are twenty-four in each human sperm and egg cell. They are called chromosomes and they unite together at the conception of a new human being. But (following the analogy of other living things, for this has not been seen in the human) no sooner does the unity occur than the tiny speck formed by it is separated into two. One of the two bits becomes the reproductive cells of the new being, with their stock of eternal hereditary elements, or genes as they are called, meaning birth-factors or character-factors. The genes are unaffected by what is going to happen to their tiny companion, which itself will grow into the individual body of the new being.

    That being will grow up, unite, and have children, but what he or she does in her lifetime has no effect upon the genes and the intrinsic characteristics which the children inherit through them. That was decided at the first division of the tiny speck.

    The genes cannot be changed by the deeds of the individuals who hand them on. They carry with them the imperishable hope of mankind, the indestructibility of the eternal by the temporal. Nevertheless, the temporal can cause a general weakness of the genes. It can poison them. It can cause them to be handed on in an enfeebled condition. But it cannot alter their innate characters.

    The reason why these genes or birth-factors or characterfactors can be weakened is because they dwell in the centres or nucleus of the reproductive cells in the testes or ovaries and are fed by the blood and Iymph of the body. Again it is food. They have to be fed. If the food is good, they are strong; if faulty, they are weakened.

    Thomson gives some of the causes of the food becoming faulty--excessive alcohol, tobacco, opium, various diseases, "may cause profound changes in the nutritive stream." Still more, of course, can actual faulty feeding of the individual's reproductive cells. So the genes, lodged in the nuclei of these cells, suffer from the unhealthy juices in the cell and are weakened. A general weakness is thus handed on from parent to child, due to the unhealthy ways of the parent. But the parent does not doom the offspring to cancer, tuberculosis, or other particular disease in this way, but only gives it a susceptibility to disease in general. In short, owing to one's parents one can be sickly, but one cannot inherit any specific sickness.

    It is this sickliness which results in illnesses which may be caught from the parents or induced by like faulty habits, which are sometimes wrongly regarded as the inheritance of disease or an inherited susceptibility to a particular disease. It is not strictly heredity, for it is due to temporary conditions, and if these temporary conditions are avoided or overcome the illnesses would not occur. Nature endows life with a powerful eternal capacity to renew itself healthily, given the right conditions. The genes know nothing of diseases.

    The primary condition for the health of the future offspring is the proper feeding of the parents so as to provide healthy genes.

    I shall not stress further the argument that faulty food is the most general primary cause of disease. But I do wish to stress that it is within the ambit of faulty feeding that at present all the work on human nutrition is being carried out.

    In proportion as this is so this work is subjective and carried out in a setting which is not that of health as wholeness. It is studying ourselves and our peoples, amongst whom faulty feeding is innate, and its measures and acceptances of facts are therefore faulty also. It is saturated with a solvent that is itself impure.

    To get to the truth it is necessary to be objective, namely, to study health and physique in peoples who have not yet come within the ambit of the faulty feeding of western civilization.

    We have to study their food, but much more than their calories, vitamins, proteins, salts, etc. We have to study above all their food's health and its physique, and how these come about, whether its health and physique, both vegetable and animal, completes the circle of health of which it, as the food, is one half and the people who eat it are the other.



Chapter IX
THE HUNZA FOOD AND ITS CULTIVATION

PART I -- FOOD
    THE foods of the Hunza, as stated in the first chapter, consist of grains, wheat, barley, buckwheat, and small grains; leafy green vegetables, potatoes (introduced half a century ago), other root vegetables, peas and beans; gram or chick pea, and other pulses; fresh milk and buttermilk or lass); clarified butter and cheese; fruit, chicfly apricots and mulberries, fresh and sun- dried; meat on rare occasions; and sometimes wine made from grapes. Their children are breast-fed up to three years, it being considered unjust to the living child for its lactation to be interrupted by a maternal pregnancy.

    The Hunza do not take tea, rice, sugar, or eggs. Chickens in a confined area destroy crops and are not kept.

    Looking through the diet, it will be seen that there is nothing strange to the westerner in the Hunza foods. All of them, except perhaps one or two of the smaller grain foods, are common to both peoples.

    The difference lies in the way they are eaten and the way they are cultivated. It is upon these differences that the better health and physique of the Hunza in the major part depends.

    Of cereal foods the Hunza prefer wheat, which they themselves grow and which they also get by barter from the Nagiris. Sometimes chick pea is ground up with the wheat, sometimes beans, barley, and peas are ground together. From the wheat-flour they make their bread or chapattis.

    This bread is the first of the Hunza foods that differs from the western bread. The Hunza prefers wheat for his bread, so do the English. In this they are alike. But in making it into bread they differ.

    The difference is in the grinding. The Hunza grind so that the greater part of the grain appears in the flour. Their resulting bread is wholemeal bread. It is like the Kleiebrot upon which Professor Hindhede fed the Danes, but without the extra bran. It has, of course, its own bran.

    The westerners grind their flour to a fine white powder and of this make their bread, which differs from the wholemeal bread in its appearance and its lack of valuable parts of the grain.

    McCarrison spoke of the Hunza diet as consisting of "the unsophisticated foods of Nature"; foods not subjected to artificial processes before they reach the consumer. A "sophist" is defined in the English Encyclopaedia Dictionary as "a cunning and skilful man, a teacher of arts and sciences for money." Sophistication for reasons of money does not occur in Hunza.

    The Hunza grow their own wheat, but some, as has been said, they get by barter from the Nagiris. They grind it between stones and make their unleavened chapattis from the fresh flour or they take the grain to the mills, where it is made into flour and stored in large chests. They therefore do not eat Nature's foods as they are. Only in the summer do they eat young green corn raw and direct. Otherwise they manipulate it by grinding and cooking.

    The westerners do the same. They manipulate and cook their corn to make it into bread. But in their case the term "sophisticated" can be attached to their bread. Art and money both enter into and modify its manufacture.

    At one time the British flour was much like the Hunza flour. Then came the introduction of the steam-driven machine, the industrial era and a huge increase of population. More wheat was urgently needed.

    In response to this demand the steel-faced plough was invented in America about 1840. This plough solved the problem of grass. Previously grass made a firm matting over the earth, and its removal by hand labour was infinitely tedious. The plough cut up even the tough grass of the-prairie and turned the sod upside down so that the exposed roots died.

    The virgin soil was exposed, and having the stored soil's food of rotted grass, it yielded excellent crops of wheat. The time came when this store was partly exhausted, but for a long while the wheat-fields answered the hungry call of the increasing manufacturing areas.

    The Americans soon erected mills and exported the flour instead of the grain. Now, the part of the grain from which the new plant starts to grow or germ is oily. It is, as one might expect, the part of the grain which best assists the sexual powers of the animal who eats it. It invigorates the whole animal through the strengthening of the reproductive system.

    But the wheat germ oil which has this potent effect has a great disadvantage from the point of view of a world trade, such as the opening up of the American prairies offered. If ground up with the flour, the flour was apt to go sour with keeping and on long journeys.

    So the germ was eliminated by the commercial milling process.

    Covering the wheat grain is a skin--the bran. This protects the grain, as all living skins protect. They all protect in a living way, not merely in a mechanical way like a wall or covering. They can regrow themselves if injured, and beneath and within them they store substances upon which they can call to strengthen their efforts.

    In the commercial process of milling this branny skin was also removed. If it stayed behind, it made the flour less white. More of it made the flour brown, and the resulting bread brown bread. Brown bread may be just white flour and bran without the germ, or it may be wholemeal bread, or it may be wholemeal bread with extra bran, like Hindhede's bread.

    Whichever it is, it is tinged or coloured. But the new milling turned out a white, or bolted flour, free of the germ and free of the protective skin, and consisting only of the store, chiefly of starch, set aside in the grain to feed the infant plant. Ground into powder, this made a nice-looking white flour which did not go sour with storing, could be carried by trains and ships all over the world and be made into tasty and clean-looking loaves wherever it finally arrived.

    But it lacked the supreme vitality area of the grain, the germ, and it lacked the protective skin.

    The Hunza bread does not lack these two parts of the grain. This alone might account for the Hunza's lack of nerves and vigour into old age, for they are great bread eaters. It might also account in part for the sexual disabilities that occur in modern cities and its accompaniments of treatment--commercial nostrums and literature.

    Whether this is so or not, the plain fact remains that a part of the grain is thrown away for commercial and esthetic reasons; that is to say, for sophisticated reasons from the point of view of food as primary.

     There is certainly no instinct in people to guide them to the better bread of the two; for instinct and appetite cannot be regarded as guides in food matters to-day. They have them selves been so successfully put through the mill of modern commercialism that they have been stripped of reliability. On this point the League of Nations Committee's Report upon The Problem of Nutrition declares: "It must be realised that instinct and appetite alone cannot be regarded as reliable guides in the choice offood." And McCollum and Simmonds are more emphatic on this very question of the general accept ance or preference of white flour: "This (the polishing of rice) and th' artfcially established liking for white flour and white cornmeal," they write in italics, "is an illustration of the failure of the instinct of man to serve as a safe guide in the selection of food. The aesthetic sense is appealed to in greatest measure in this case by the lowest biologic values."

    That original but insufficiently known thinker, Mr. Matthias Alexander, teaches that the chief defect in modern man is that progress and civilization have proceeded so rapidly that they have outstripped the instincts. The instincts are very slow in their selective formation, and progress has pushed forward at such a speed that it has been impossible for the instincts to keep pace with it. He himself stresses this particularly in the bodily posture, which must impress any observer of urban man. Writing, as I do, in a large public library, the postures of those who are writing amply illustrate Alexander's teaching. They are round-shouldered and ungainly. There is only one writer who I noted write with an arrow-straight back, and on enquiry I found that he had been through Alexander's training.

    In the matter of food, and particularly in the public favour given to wholemeal bread, this outstripping ofthe instinct is most noticeable. It is not because wholemeal bread is not tasty. It is a very pleasant bread to the taste, and Hindhede's Kleiebrot is not only tasty but bakes excellently. Nevertheless, men's instincts are not strong enough for its general adoption now, nor were they strong enough to reject white bread at its initial introduction, although, in regard to vitamin B~ alone the bestfed people of today get less of this vital element than did the parish poor of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

    As Alexander states, if man wishes to regain his pristine health and bodily vigour he has to abandon any reliance on instinct and save himself by knowledge or conscious control.

    This can be done by the individual in the matter of bread, for the wholemeal bread is procurable. But to change the habit of the western world is a stupendous task, and one to which its governments have given little attention. For wholemeal bread is a matter of freshness. The Hunza takes his bread fresh from his own fields; we often from great distances, because, though less fresh and vital, it is cheap.

    One sees, then, in this respect the value of national selfsufficiency, which has long been a political faith in France and is now one in Germany and has had such an influence on other countries of the west. National self-sufficiency in its principal foods is undoubtedly a necessity, if a nation is to attain to the health that is possible. We who desire to base life on physiology must assert this as an axiom.

    It has been said that Britain could not produce enough food for its own people. On the other hand, that great authority, Prince Kropotkin, calculated that she could produce sufficient food for 100,000,000 people. Anyone who has compared the meticulous care and agrarian economy of China and Japan with the empty grass fields of Britain is forced to the conclusion that the effort to make Britain self-sufficient in food is lacking. In spite of our physiological conviction of the need, the Returns of the Ministry of Agriculture for the last year, ending June 1936, show that progress is still physiological regress. In that year 33, 100 more workers were drawn from the land, and this was not caused by mechanisation. No less than 284,900 acres went out of cultivation, 69,000 of these being wheat acres. Potato acreage decreased 7,000 acres. Pigs have decreased by 11,000, breeding sows, cattle by 7,100 head, and chickens to the figure of 884,000. The only increase, possibly in answer to the teachings of the nutritionists, has been in green vegetables, 7000 acres, and carrots, 1,000 acres.

    To sum up, the advantages of the Hunza bread are that it is physiologically economical, for the whole grain is used. Nothing is lost. It is also fresh. It comes from their own fields with the same freshness as fruit and vegetables come from our gardens.

    There is one other difference, and that is cultivation. The Hunza, as we shall see in this chapter, have an admirable cultivation. They, moreover, have an irrigation from the mountains, and this spreads a fine silt over the land each year, which is comparable to the silt that is spread over the Egyptian corn-fields by the Nile.

    Opposed to this are the prairies of the new world, which yield such magnificent crops in their virginal state. The nitrogen and other nourishment are supplied by the decay of the grass until the steel plough roots up the grass and destroys it. To them no silt comes annually. After some years of cropping, they have, therefore, to be fed, and they are given chemical manures. There is reason to believe, as will be seen later, that the quality of the grains has deteriorated owing to this. In the recent Lloyd Roberts lecture McCarrison said that in India the same grain, when grown on the same soil and watered in the same way, was of higher nutritive value when the soil had been manured with natural farmyard manure than when manured with artificial chemical manure. It is what one would expect. "Nature," as Dr. Lawrie entitles his iconclastic book, "hits back."

    We all live on milk for a number of months in that period of our lives when growth is most rapid. At that time its freshness is immediate. It has even been shown that this has an unanalysable value, for young animal sucklings do better from breast-feeding than when given their mothers' milk previously withdrawn from the breast.

    Milk is therefore a complete food. Adults separate from it the fat as cream or butter, and the proteins as cheese, a protein that is said by nutritionists to have a higher value than that of meat. It is certainly a substitute for meat and largely taken by all agrarian peoples in its place.

    Milk has to be fresh. It cannot be transported and stored as flour can. After drawing it stales rapidly, and this constitutes a problem of its supply to those who do not live in the country. In hot countries and seasons, milk is more rapidly affected than in colder ones. Where the cows are liable to tuberculosis, as is the case in western stalled cows, the milk may convey the disease. Methods to preserve milk are therefore necessary both in the west and east.

    In this matter of the preservation of milk it is difficult to say whetner the Hunza have the advantage of the west. The Hunza follow the Oriental custom of separating the fat and boiling it to form ghee or clarified butter. They eat the ghee with their food and they use it for cooking. As the boiling forms an intervener between the fresh butter and the consumer, their method cannot be said to be as good as ours. It is in the hot weather forced upon them, for ghee keeps better than butter.

    The butter-milk or lassi that is left they drink. They also drink whole milk. They sour milk and butter-milk, which keep better when soured. They take plenty of these liquids with or without spices, though they do not get the large quantities which the Sikhs drink. The souring of milk to preserve it is thus pitted against our method of pasteurization. It is not easy to say which is the better, but the evidence is in favour of the souring, if one accepts the statement that wherever soured milk is largely used--in the Balkans, North Africa and wide areas of Asia--"fine physique, good health and virility are usually seen" (The Problem of Nutrition, Vol. I, League of Nations). The contribution to the fine physical development may here be the milk, which these people take much more freely and regularly than we do, and not to any particular virtue in its being soured.

    On the other hand, our process of making milk safe has not won general approval.

    Firstly, there is the unreliability of milk- pasteurizing plants. Recently in the House of Commons the Minister of Health announced that it was known that a high proportion of pasteurizing plants in London and elsewhere were producing improperly pasteurized milk.

    At a later day came a letter to The Times from the retiring president of the National Council of Milk Recording Societies, Sir Arnold Wilson, in which he said it had been proved that there was less tuberculosis in rural areas where all milk is drunk raw than in cities where all milk is pasteurized. "Pasteurization," he added, "is supported by the whole weight of great commercial interests, who cannot dispense with it, but all available evidence suggests that its value as a safeguard against illness is small."

    Moreover, there is evidence that pasteurization reduces certain healthy qualities of milk. Possibly souring does so too. I have found no scientific experiments on this point, and they would have to be very convincing to weigh against the evidence of the Balkan, North African, Arab, Hunza, Sikh, and other drinkers of it with their exceptional physique.

    One quality of health which is injured or destroyed by heating, especially if prolonged, is grouped by nutritionists under the vitamin C. So the raising of the milk to 140°F., and keeping it there for half an hour of pasteurization undoubtedly injures it. Wilson quotes the Cattle Diseases Committee as stating that this loss will seriously affect the health of young children if uncorrected by the addition of fruit juice. As lemons and oranges are more expensive than they were, the danger has increased. Anyhow, a method which forces the need of compensating a food is faulty, and part of our "faulty feeding" is the cause of disease. The right way to avoid diseases conveyed by milk is sound human, animal, vegetable and soil nutrition, as Wilson himself concludes.

    A further defect of pasteurized milk has been revealed by the work of A. L. Daniels and G. Stearns, published in the American Journal of Biological Chemistry, Volume XXXVII (1919). They found by observation that children who were put on milk that was quickly brought to the boiling point and cooled did better in increase of health and weight than children put on the half-an-hour heated pasteurized milk. The reason they gave is that pasteurization leads to the precipitation of the necessary calcium phosphate salts which can be found clinging to the wall of the container. Whether it was this and the greater loss of the qualities grouped under vitamin C, or some as yet undiscovered cause does not matter. What does matter is that pasteurization does delimit the health given by milk.

    There is another curious fact. Medical officers and the Ministry of Health are both aware that the milk-drinking of the children and people of Britain is too little, and they have provided milk for school children. In most cases this milk is pasteurized. It seems that quite a considerable proportion of children have an aversion to this milk, and get nausea or vomiting, diarrhoea, headache and catarrh, when they take it. The cause, it is said, is not pasteurization, but allergy or exaggerated susceptibility in the majority of cases, and this allergy occurs in children who come from families where there is a similar aversion to milk.

    It would be straining the argument to say that this might be instinct in revolt against pasteurized milk in families where instinct for a right food is yet potent, for this point has not been investigated, but I feel sure no such allergy could be found amongst the Hunza and Sikh children. Indian children whom I know never refuse milk.

    Both pasteurization and souring are interveners between the fresh milk and the consumer. Of the two the evidence is in favour of souring.

    We now pass on to leafy-green and root vegetables and pulses. The Hunza, with the exception of their occasional meat, are lacto-vegetarian feeders such as Hindhede and many other nutritionists, including McCarrison, put as the healthiest diet of mankincl. As a general diet it may well be so, though the polar Eskimos, with an entirely opposite diet, do not yield to the lacto-vegetarians in health and physical endurance.

    Vegetables therefore play a great part in Hunza feeding. The vegetables they have are mostly similar to ours, but as potatoes, now largely grown and eaten, were only introduced after the British expedition in 1892, they take no part in their traditional well-being.

    These vegetables they eat raw when they can, particularly as fuel is scanty. They are fond of raw green corn, young leaves, carrots, turnips and, as it were to exaggerate their veneration for freshness, they sprout their pulses and eat them and their first green. This eating of sprouting pulse or gram is widespread in Northern India, and undoubtedly within it there is a health which there is not in the pulse itself.

    Except for their use of sprouting gram, I do not know that there is any striking difference here. Probably the Hunza eat raw vegetables more freely than we do. Some of us hardly eat them at all, whereas that could not happen among the Hunza.

    They have little fuel and small fires. They cook their vegetables chiefly by boiling in covered pots. But the process is more comparable to our way of steaming and cooking in their own juice. Very little water is added. When this has been used up more is added. The water in which the vegetables are cooked is drunk either with the vegetables or later. The point is that it is part of their food. It is not thrown away.

    The taking of vegetable water is very obvious sense. It is surprising that we should think that there is nothing soluble in vegetables which is of value, and that they can be soaked and cooked in water without something passing from them into the water. What do pass into the water are salts. Are these salts valuable? The question can be answered by the blunt answer that they are there, and when something is in a food that can be taken, it should be taken. Over and above the fact that a food is a whole thing and should be taken as a whole, there is abundat evidence from the scientists of the loss that occurs through the throwing away of vegetable water of phosphorous, calcium, iron, iodine, sulphur etc. Quite a considerable proportion of the pharmacopcea seems to have arisen owing to this waste. Quite a considerable number of the doctor's prescriptions and patent medicines may be due to the need to replace the salts of the food in those who suffer from the loss. The similarity of the medicines and the lost salts is too close for one not to be profoundly suspicious that the methods of cooking cause or contribute to the subsequent need of the medicines.

    It is not possible to say how this habit of throwing away the water in which vegetables are cooked originated. On the surface it seems clear that it is connected with the plate versus bowl. One cannot drink liquid from a plate. One can only sop it up with bread, and that is wanting in efficiency and manners. But when the food is served in a bowl or bowls, then the fluid part of the food is not lost. I have no doubt that if British children were served their vegetables with the water in which they were cooked in bowls instead of on plates there would be an improvement in their health.

    In the culture of their vegetables the Hunza's way differs from that of the west. This vital question will occupy the second part of this chapter. Here it must suffice to say that the Hunza are agrarian craftsmen, individual gardeners, as opposed to rural labourers in large-scale commercial enterprise. So the Hunza vegetables come, as we prefer vegetables to come, straight from the garden.

    The Hunza do not wash their vegetables with our assiduity. Like our fondness for white bread, a cleanly appearance appeals to us probably owing to our innate dislike that any one dirty should handle our food, so we prefer our vegetables very clean. We hate to see them soiled, which may be only due to good, clean earth, but may have other origin. Staining also suggests unhealthiness of the vegetable. Consequently the protective skin of our carrots and other vegetables is apt to be rubbed off, with the result that they decay more rapidly with keeping and their flavours deteriorate. Flavour must be a healthy quality, for it is the bait of nature.

    The Hunza eat the edible protective skins of their vegetables. They do not soak and wash the vegetables to the degree that loses some of the salts as we do, and of course they have no such instruments as those which give celery, for instance, its fine white appearance by getting rid of its valuable outer layers. Their sophistication is far less than ours in this matter too. They, of course, do not eat vegetables dirty as our four-footed brethren are forced to do. They clean to get rid of the soil, but they have no fetish of cleanliness induced by the fear of dangerous dirt as we have.

    Meat is a rare pleasure of the Hunza, as it is with the Sikh, both of whom take it on average about every ten days. In Hunza it is scarcer than previously. Some may not get it once a month. It is more frequently eaten in winter. As with the Eskimo and others, the Hunza eat all that is edible of the carcase and not the meat only.

    The reason of its scarcity as a food is that the animals are valued as dairy animals in a country where pasture and fodder are scarce. In the winter, when there is still less cattle food, there is more reason for killing.

    Animal food is well-liked and figures at feasts. Schomberg describes its cooking on an occasion of ceremony. It is cut up and put into a covered pot with a mass of pounded wheat. Vegetables may also be added and red pepper for seasoning. Very little water is used, and when it is nearly finished more water and vegetables with theirjuices are added. The vegetables stew in their own juice, the meat and wheat in the water, a slow boiling and steaming like that of the Japanese workers, who make the pot ready in the morning before they go to work, so that the cooking is finished on their return. Schomberg says this slow cooking at ceremonial feasts continues for twenty-four hours. Nothing of course is lost in the material cooked, but such prolonged heat, even in covered pots, must destroy the factors of food, without which scurvy results. The Hunza, however, get no scurvy, because this stew is only a part of their diet and an unusual one. They have ample food to counteract the undoubted faultiness of such prolonged cooking. They also eat sun-dried meat raw, if it is fat and well-flavoured.

    This heating, and particularly boiling, is the chief human sophistication of food. Its danger is that it destroys the factors grouped round vitamin C, and scurvy, either in its mild form of pallor and lassitude, or its severe form of foul flesh and bleeding, results. Before the cause of scurvy was discovered and better feeding prevented it, it was particularly fatal to soldiers on campaign and men on the high seas. It has been also argued by Mr. A. M. Ludovici in his admirable treatise, Man's Descent from the Gods, that the legend of Prometheus can be explained in no other way but by the scorbutic evils which followed the introduction of cooking. Prometheus brought fire to mankind and was punished by Zeus. For in the place of the pristine health of the people came woes and sicknesses, only to be alleviated later by Dionysus, the saviour, who taught men how to ferment grape juice, ivy juice, honey, and to eat germinated grains. That is the bare outline of this notable explanation, for it is known of course that these fermentations and sproutings, young life in fact, are particularly effective against scurvy. The remedy of Dionysus, in short, was a remedy that would be applied to-day.

    Now, at feasts, at Biddulph's "public jollifications," the Hunza drink freely of their fresh home-made wine. So what they lose in the pot they gain from the bottle.

    In this the Hunza are followers of Dionysus, as indeed most peasantries have been since the days of the Greek saviour, if permitted to follow their own bent. The more orthodox teetotal Moslems have, however, long frowned on the Hunza, who, nevertheless, still drink their wine. The Puritans of England, in like manner, frowned upon the English peasants who made merry with the old English ale and mead. Nowadays, the manufactured and advertised products of the brewing and distilling industries have reduced almost to nullity the elderberry, damson, gooseberry, dandelion, apple wine and other home-brews of our peasantry.

    So, in the matter of balance to cooking by home-brews and sprouting gram, the Hunza undoubtedly are better off than we. Their fermented buttermilk and wines, like their corn from the field and their vegetables from the garden, are direct and lively. They bear freshness with them. They are not staled by interloping.

    They therefore fill their original purpose of being valuable for their intrinsic qualities to their creators. Their value may well be that they are a balance of one art against another art, of fermentation against cooking. By fermentation a fresh, living vitality is brought in to balance a food which heat has changed and robbed. That fermented drinks do have to balance something that is lost in cooking has not been proved. It has scarcely been investigated, the question has been so fogged by prejudice. But that fermentation has played a large part in balancing some defect, that, in a cliche, it supplied a long-felt want, seems a very reasonable explanation of the regard which human beings pay to it, even when their food is particularly sound.

    "The Hunza are great fruit eaters, especially of apricots and mulberries. They use apricots and mulberries in both the fresh and dry state, drying sufficient of their rich harvest of them for use throughout the autumn and winter months" (McCarrison). They eat the fruit fresh in season, cracking the stones and eating the kernels as well. Otherwise they take them, particularly sun-dried apricots, and eat them as they are or rub them in water to form a thick liquid called chamus. Dried mulberries they put into cakes as we do sultanas. They do not cook their fruits. "Fruit is really the Hunza staple. It is eaten with bread, far more so than vegetables, as it is more abundant" (Schomberg).

    That this fruit is a healthy food is amply proved by the Hunza health. But, then, the Hunza health proves the health of their other foods as well, for it proves a whole. It proves that the foods or diet of the Hunza as a whole result in a human wholeness of health that is supremely excellent. The fruit, forming what Schomberg called the Hunza staple, is clearly therefore good. Everyone, however, is agreed that fresh fruit is excellent. It has a pre- eminence amongst foods which is shown by the words men attach to it--its freshness, its lusciousness, its purity. It is the only food which the average citizen feels comes to him in the intended way, to be accepted in its unchanged natural form. It alone of the foods still preserves its pristine character and therefore is associated in his mind with something of a fresh wholesomeness like the feel of the wind when a new morning breaks. He feels, too, that there is such a direct relationship between the sun and fruit. Fruit, more obviously than other foods, ripens and colours in the sun. Sunlight is the carrier of the sun's quality. Through it that quality comes direct from the great orb of our being. It stores itself in sun-bathed food, as in a minor way electricity is stored in a battery. The eating of fruit releases the sun's quality in its most direct and least interfered-with form.

    The Hunza prepare their fruit for the autumn and winter months by drying for a few days in the sun and storing it in baskets in a dry place. Does it thereby gain directly over fruit that is dried and preserved by other processes without exposure to the sun? There is no definite answer to this question. Our storing of fruit is found to lessen its value, but whether there is less loss in sun-dried apricots I have not succeeded in finding in scientific experiment. One can only arswer with the old answer--that the Hunza prove their food.

    What are the relative amounts of the different foods which the Hunza eat at a meal? This, of course, is left to the individual Hunza. It is a matter of personal appetite and choice.

    But, states the report of the League of Nations on The Problem of Nutrition, "it must be realised that instinct and appetite alone cannot be regarded as reliable guides in the choice of food."

    That is not so with the Hunza. Their instincts and appetites cannot be looked upon as unreliable in relation to their foods. The Hunza still belong to at period when, because sophistication was very limited, instinct was reliable.

    Instinct, says Alexander, has been outstripped by the speed of progress. The Hunza have in their mountain isolation kept largely free from that progress This isolation, however, has been very different from that of the American Indian before the coming European colonists or that of the polar Eskimos, for his country is and has been one of the highways between India, Aghanistan, Russia, and China. He has had contact with many peoples. But this has not changed his instinct or culture.

    The reason of this is of vital importance in the whole relation of the Hunza to physique and health. The Hunza has not had to follow others. He has, on his part, inherited from immense distances of time a form of agriculture which has claims to be the most successful in the history of man. His agriculture has not been inferior to others. Again, as opposed to American Indians and polar Eskimos, it has been one that is famous far beyond the bounds of his small valley. The valley of the River Hunza, in its way, has possessed and preserved something of the magic of the valley of the River Eurotas.


PART II -- CULTIVATION

    The cultivation of the Hunza is that of irrigated, staircase terraces in mountain valleys, and it is probable that it is not only the greatest but it is also the oldest form of agriculture. That is not proven, but it is a growing conviction which Professor Haldane voices in The Inequality of Man (1932) that "agriculture started in the mountains, and only later spread to the river valleys."

    The importance of the method of culture of food is primary, radical, and fundamental in the matter of health. It exceeds all other aspects of nutrition--if, that is, one separates any aspect of what is a whole. I make no apology, therefore, for asking my readers to leave the Himalaya for a time and transfer themselves to the next mightiest range of mountains, the Andes of Peru. It was in their valleys that the irrigated, staircase farming reached its highest known development.

    Twenty years ago the National Geographic Society of the United States sent an expedition to Peru to study the relics of agricultural methods of its ancient people. Mr. O. F. Cook, of the Bureau of Plant Industry of the U.S.A. Department of Agriculture, was attached as botanist, and he published a report entitled "Staircase Farms of the Ancients" in the Society's magazine of May, 1916.

    "Agriculture is not a lost art," are his opening words, "but must be reckoned as one of those which reached a remarkable development in the remote past and afterward declined. The system of the ancient Peruvians enabled them to support large populations in places where modern farmers would be helpless."

    The system reached its culmination centuries before Columbus discovered America, and before the Incas ruled in Peru. The people who created it have left no written records and bear no historic name. They are, therefore, called after the most striking feature of their work, the megalithic people, because they built the walls of their terraced fields and aqueducts of great stones. These they made to fit, the one with the other, with such accuracy that even to this day they are like those of the Egyptian pyramids, a knife blade cannot be inserted between them.

    The megalithic people were great builders with stone. So, following the same traditions, were the Incas. But the work under the Incas was not such a careful fitting, and frequently the interspaces were filled in with clay.

    The method of their making of a stairway of terraced fields need not be described. It is much the same as that followed in other mountainous parts, such as, for one, the present Gilgit Agency. The result is a small flat field. Photographed in cross-section, the fields show so many feet of coarse stones and clay below and so many of soil above. The soil was originally imported from beyond the great mountains, for the steep mountain slopes and valleys did not provide it in sufficient quantity. It was refreshed by the silt which the irrigating water brought from the mountains. The soil is still in its place to this day, and to this day each terrace shows the same inside structure whenever walls are removed.

    The fields rise up the slopes of the mountains, tier upon tier, for sometimes over fifty tiers. Some of the walls of the megalithic people are so enormous and well fitted and so formidable in their show of power, that most western travellers have believed them to be fortresses and described them as such, which "only shows how far our own race is from appreciating the devotion of the ancient people to their agricultural pursuits."

    Similar fields were built in the valleys themselves. Valley rivers were straightened in their courses and their destructive overflows controlled.

    Such were the megalithic achievements in reclamation, besides which, says Cook, in italics, "our undertakings sink into insignificance on the face of what this vanished race accomplished. The narrow floors and steep walls of rocky valleys that would appear utterly worthless and hopeless to our engineers were transformed, literally made over, into fertile lands, and were the homes of teeming populations in the prehistoric days." Even to this day thousands of these acres are still fertile and the main support of the native population, who accept them as a matter of course and make no enquiry as to their origin.

    The staircase fields were irrigated. The aqueducts were often of great length. Prescott states that "one that traversed the district of Condesuyu measured between four and five hundred miles." Cook publishes a photograph of an aqueduct as a thin dark line traversing a steep mountain wall many hundreds of feet above the valley. It gives one an overwhelming impression of these colossal works, a sudden sense of the stupendousness which is theirs. They were national works, solely for the good of the people. Beside them, as Cook says, the far-famed hanging gardens of Babylon--a pyramid with broad steps of troughs holding soil--was a toy; built, perhaps, to please Nebuchadnezzar's Median queen as a reminder of the terraced culture of her home.

    Such works must, one thinks, have supported an agriculture no less wonderful than themselves. This was the case. These Peruvian staircase gardens were a centre, and probably the most important centre, where the agriculture of indigenous American civilizations was created. In them were domesticated and from them were dispersed over the rest of the Americas many vegetable foods.

    "The following partial list of the Peruvian crop plants," writes Mr. Cook, "may give an idea of the extent and variety of domestications that were accomplished in Peru: Achupalla (pineapple), anu (Tropacolum), apichu (sweet potato), apincoya (Grandilla), arracacacha (Arracacia), chirimaya, chui (bean), coca (Erythroxylum), cumara (sweet potato), inchis (peanut), oca (oxalic), pallar (Lima bean), papa (potato), papaya poro (bottle gourd), purutu (frejol), quinoa (Chenopodium), rocoto (Capsicum), rumu (Manihot), sauwinto (guava), sara (maize), tintin (Tacsonia), ullucu (Ullucus), uncucha (Xanthosna), utar (cotton).

    "A complete list of the plants that were cultivated by the ancient Peruvians has yet to be made, but it will probably include between seventy and eighty species. A large part are root crops, vegetables and fruits, but some are seed crops, pot herbs, condiments, medicinal plants, dyes, and ornamentals. Annual plants predominate in numbers and importance, but perennials, shrubs and trees are also well represented."

    Returning to the Gilgit Agency, one would expect similarities between the conditions of the Andes and north-western Himalaya, both ranges of exceeding loftiness, well sunned and without excessive rainfall. One would expect these similarities to produce from intelligent peoples a similarity of agriculture.

    The agriculture of the valleys of the Gilgit Agency are cultivated by means of terraced fields and irrigation, as were the valleys of ancient Peru.

    Further, the area of the Gilgit Agency and its neighbour, the mountainous parts of Afghanistan, once formed an agricultural centre in the same way as Peru. The resemblance of the two greatest mountain areas is very close indeed.

    Hunza, which is the best product of the Gilgit Agency, itself is but a microcosm of the Peruvian Empire. In both the people were eager for land, they were in the modern phrase starved for land. Upon their own great efforts depended their continuance as a people in the mountain valleys. So both became distinguished at their best by the arduous perfection of their toil.

    It is a most happy fortune that one of the visitors of Hunza was a man who combined artistic sense,historical knowledge, love of mountains, and a sensitive observation in a degree which would be rare in each several faculty. The late Lord Conway explored and climbed both in the Andes and the Western Himalaya.

    He was the first to place the redoubtable Hunza in their rightful historic place. "The terraced fields," he wrote, in The Bolivian Andes (1901)--Bolivia was a part of Ancient Peru-- "reaching aloft, awake vivid reminiscences of the mountain scenery of the north-west frontier of India--as, for instance, in Hunza, where the native population are living in a stage of civilization that must bear no little likeness to that of the Peruvians under Inca government."

    In Climbing and Exploration in the Karakorum Himalaya (1894), seven years before his visit to the Andes, Conway gave a picture of Hunza which he came to recognize as a microcosm of Ancient Peru. He was on his way to Baltit, the capital of Hunza.

    "The path that leads up to Baltit is bordered on either side by a wall of dry cyclopean masonry, the undressed component parts of which are very large and excellently fitted together. Where the slope steepens these walls are placed further apart, and short zigzags are built up between them--a monumental piece of simple engineering. We walked slowly, for there was much to look at, the cultivation being everywhere admirable and each step disclosing some new detail of beauty or interest. The whole of this side of the debris-filled floor of the valley between the cliffs and edge of the river's gorge is covered with terraced fields. They are terraced because they must be flat in order that the irrigating water may lie on them. The downward edge of each terrace must be supported by a strong stone wall, and every one of these is of cyclopean work, like those just described. The cultivated area of the oasis is some five square miles in extent. When it is remembered that the individual fields average as many as twenty to the acre, it will be seen what a stupendous mass of work was involved in the building of these walls and the collection of earth to fill them. The walls have every appearance of great antiquity, and alone suffice to prove the long existence in this remote valley of an organized and industrious community. . . .

    "To build these fields was the smaller part of the difficulties that husbandmen had to face in Hunza. The fields also had to be irrigated. For this purpose there was but one perennial supply of water--the torrent from the Ultar glacier. The snout of that glacier, as has been stated, lies deep in a rockbound gorge, whose sides are for a space perpendicular cliffs. The torrent had to be tapped, and a canal of sufficient volume to irrigate so large an area had to be carried across the face of one of these precipices. The Alps contain no Wasserleitung which for volume and boldness of position can be compared to the Hunza canal. It is a wonderful work for such toolless people as the Hunzakats to have accomplished, and it must have been done many centuries ago and maintained ever since, for it is the life-blood of the valley."

    The Peruvians were also comparatively toolless. "That they should have accomplished these difficult works with such tools as they possessed is truly wonderful," are Prescott's words.

    Conway continues with a brief account of the social system of the Hunza, which was at his time a miniature of that of the Incas of Peru. He calls it semi-civilized. I do not think that is a permissible term. It is a fully developed form of association of men for their own benefit, supported by tradition and an accepted form of authority for its execution and adaptation to any unusual conditions that occur. It is, in a word, a definite form of agricultural civilization.

    "Still more difficult for a semi-civilized people," are Conway's words, "must have been the elaboration and enforcement of the laws regulating the distribution of the water over the land. They were a necessity of the situation, and the existence of the fields proves that such laws were evolved and maintained . . . . A strong central power, wielded, of course, by a single hand, was the inevitable result."

    We are now able to see with greater clarity and wider observation that the remarkable physique of this people is not causeless nor accidental, nor a happy chance of nature, nor due to fresh mountain air, but that it has a long, long history to support it. It has been famous in its part of the world for its efficiency in the arts of agriculture in the past, it is famous to this day. Its biggest aqueduct, the Berber, is, says Schomberg, "famous everywhere in Asia, . . . the mere existence of these kuls (aqueducts) places the men of Hunza as a class apart." They are exceptional agriculturists now, as they must have been in the past, and by that character they have preserved century after century a quality of agriculture which has rendered to them through food its return gift of perfect physique and health. But this they have only maintained through a constant and meticulous devotion to its service.

    The agriculture of the north-west frontier of India has been shown to go back into the remotest recesses of human time. What is to be written now cannot be pinned locally to Hunza. Hunza forms a part of the area which it describes. But it is not unfair to think that Hunza, as much as any other part, and possibly more, is a direct descendant from this remote past. Al} the evidence we have so far produced makes this a reasonable inference.

    The evidence is again strikingly like that which Cook produced from Ancient Peru. It is to be found in a report upon Agricultural Afghanistan, by Professor N. I. Vavilov and D. D. Bukunich, based on the data and materials of the expedition they undertook for the Institute of Applied Botany. The report was published in Leningrad in 1929. It is in Russian, but there is an English summary of seventy-five pages. An English review of Vavilov's work may also be found in Professor Haldane's essay, Prehistory in the Light of Genetics. I have followed the English summary published at Leningrad.

    Two out of four of the objects of this expedition was (1) to study the different crops and varieties over the slopes of the Hindu-Kush; (2) to study the technique and especially the irrigation of agriculture.

    The authors visit "the most typical sedentary farming for Afghanistan in the narrow high mountain valleys," and note to their surprise: "Nevertheless, this isolated, poor mountain country holds striking riches of varieties, displays an astonishing diversity of the most important crop plants of the Old World.''

    They give an exhaustive account of the various plants which they found in this area, the many forms of wheat and other cereals, the striking diversity of forms of the beans, peas, and lentils; many forms of salad plants with transitional stages from the weeds to cultivated plants; "multifarious original forms of carrots, turnips and radishes astound inglyrich in varieties"; spinach and other green-leafed vegetables from wildness to cultivation, and finally, "analogical facts revealed by the study of fruit crops: the pomegranate, walnut, apricot, elaeagnus, zizyphus, show features of the primary form originating process."

    They thus summarize their conclusions (with their own italics). "The study of the separate crops discussed in the preceding chapters leads us to general geographical conclusions which are in direct connection with the history of agriculture and with the problem ofthe origin of cultivated plants.

    "As the investigation of the varietal diversity of cultivated plants has shown, Afghanistan with the adjacent countries, especially north-western India, is one of the most important primary world agricultural centres, where the diversity of a whole series of plants have originated. This is quite objectively proved by the varietal diversity of a series of crop plants and by the coincidence of the area of the varietal diversity of many of the most important European crops."

    Thus, as regards the diversity of the important bread-crops, the club and soft wheats, "Afghanistan occupies the first place among all countries of our planet," though "a detailed study of the adjacent north-western India might shift the focus of the origin of forms" (for) "in regard to climate, relief, and crops, the north-western corner of India, immediately bordering on Afghanistan, forms one undivided whole with the latter. The remaining part of the country sharply differs from Afghanistan in climate and soil."

    In his studies of the origin of cultivated plants Professor Vavilov found five principal world centres, one of them in south-western Asia. His and his colleagues' detailed investigation of Afghanistan, especially the corner abutting on the Gilgit Agency, has led to a more precise location of the separate crops. "The comparative study of the cultivated plants of Punjab, Kashmir, and the whole of India, have shown that the corner between the Hindu-Kush and the Himalaya must be singled out from the whole of southwestern Asia.

    "If we turn to the orography and climatalogical maps of India we shall see that its north-western corner is closely connected with eastern Afghanistan. From the southern territory of India it is separated by the desert Tar; in the north it borders on the Himalaya. Here, in the upper course ofthe Indus, in Punjab, is concentrated a great diversity of conditions, ranging from the limits of agriculture to sub-tropical conditions; here we find an abundance of water, promoting the development of irrigated cultivation."

    The explanation of the exceptional concentration of the primary sources of so many crops of European-Asiatic cultivated vegetation in the largest geological fold of the world is very difficult, say the authors.

    The modern Afghans, like the modern Peruvians, simply accept what is left of these ancient gifts, and make no attempt to improve or understand them. On the other hand, unlike Peru, Afghanistan offers no archaeological records that throw any light upon this apparently astonishing enigma.

    Nevertheless, fortunately, from out of the remote past there loom up some suggestions of a great agricultural race like to the prehistoric Peruvians. "In the last years, in this region (Punjab) connected with Afghanistan, archeological records have been found. These records, synchronical to Mesopotamic culture, remove the beginnings of culture to a much earlier epoch than depicted up to now by history and archaeology.

    "Henceforward this region, with its diversity of conditions, its concentration of the genes of cultivated plants, its multifarious population, must draw the attention of the investigator. This region evidently holds the keys to many problems of human culture. . . . The concrete solution of this problem will require huge collective work," but, alas, in the contrariness of the modern nations, he sees little hope of this being made possible in the near present.

    In this fold between the Hindu-Kush and the Himalaya lies Hunza. It is, strangely enough, the very bull's-eye of this area. "The Wakhjir pass," writes the Encyclopedia Britannica, under the heading "Hindu-Kush," "crossing the head of the Taghdumbash Pamir into the sources of the river Hunza, almost marks the trijunction of the three great chains of mountains," the Hindu-Kush, Pamir and Karakoram Himalaya.

    Once again one feels the profundity that attaches to the physique of the Hunza people. It is not accident. It is not that of the jungle. It is that of an art, the agricultural art, comparable to the tireless climb by which the Greek architecture finally reached its supreme beauty.

    It is in the study of such people that the clue to health is to be found. The final riddle of food and physique lies, not in the laboratories, but in the fields and in such combined research as Professor Vavilov urges.

    The final question in the Hunza food thus becomes: Is the circle of health complete? Are the Hunza crops and vegetation as healthy and of as perfect a physique as the Hunza themselves?

    The health of their domesticated animals is coupled with theirs. It must also be dependent on the health of the plant growths.

    If one takes a modern text-book of plant diseases, such as the well-known Manual of Plant Diseases (1935) of Professor Heald of the State College of Washington, one is as appalled by their number as one is by the list of human illnesses in a text-book of medicine. The one is the counterpart of the other.

    Heald's list begins with deficiency diseases, nitrogen deficiency, potash and calcium deficiency in tobacco, iron deficiency, magnesium hunger of soya beans, matting of leaves of cereals, gray-speck of oats, yellow berry of wheat, phosphorus deficiency of root crops, potash hunger of potatoes, and so on.

    It then passes on to excess diseases. The first of these is nitrogen excess. "Under natural conditions it is rarely present in sufficient quantity to cause injury to our crops, but the amount may be increased to the danger-point by certain farm- cropping practices or by the addition of excessive quantities of nitrogen-containing fertilisers." Then there is the pallor or chlorosis of various plants due to excess of chalk. "Some of these are pear, apple, quince, peach, apricot, prune, plum, cherry, walnut, orange and }emon." There is acidosis and alkalosis--too much acidity, too much alkali. The causes of acidity of the soil are the addition of certain manures, the continued use of acid mineral fertilisers, the interaction of natural residual components of the soil, the removal of lime by plant growth and by leaching through heavy rainfall. Alkali in too great a concentration occurs principally in semiarid lands. The deeper salts may be brought to the surface by irrigation with the rise of capillary water.

    There follow a number of diseases due to some defect in the supply of water, of oxygen to the roots of plants, as in saturated soils, excessive heat or cold, lack of light, the neighbourhood of industrial processes, and diseases due to spraying with chemicals, fumigation, and other forms of over-treatment.

    The third great group are the virus diseases. They are infectious diseases due to ultra-microscopic viruses, in the same way as certain human diseases are due to invisible but filtrable viruses.

    There follows the great group of parasitic diseases due to microbes, molds, mildews, chytrids, fungi, and finally nematode worms.

    How did all these diseases come into being? Were they present or as prevalent in the old agricultural civilizations to which Hunza belongs as they are in our modern civilization? Or are they, too, due to faulty feeding of the plants?

    I take it that what has happened to man has happened no less to his domesticated plants. Science has effected a marvellous progress in variety and fragmentation, but at the same time it has torn plants from their traditional conditions upon which their health depends. Plants have been transferred from one locality to another, from one country to another, but the factors of their stable health have not been transferred. Sometimes they have luxuriated in the new wealth of a virgin soil, and then, having wasted its substance, have deteriorated. Sometimes they have met with conditions closely resembling their accustomed ones and have done well. Sometimes all seemed well and then an expected defect showed itself in disease. Sometimes the new conditions brought into being illnesses were excessively severe. Throughout all their new experiences they have been accompanied by a growing army of plant physicians to enable them to combat the diseases in their severality. There is no doubt, I think, that modern man has made plant life in his own image.

    I have been unable to find any history of plant diseases, or study of fossils from this point of view, which could answer such a question, for instance, as: Was the vegetable life of Ancient Peru free from the diseases now current?

    In human being one can find some comparison of diseases in the past and now by the examinations, for instance, of the 30,000 bodies of Ancient Egyptians and Nubians which the late Professor Elliot-Smith epitomises in Egyptian Mummies (1924). The diseases which would be detected by these belated post-mortems are not numerous, but such as could be detected were found to be very rare, with the one exception of rheumatoid arthritis. Amongst the 30,000 there were three cases of stone in the kidney, one of gallstone, no true case of rickets, syphilis or cancer. There were ten cases of tuberculosis of the bones. Except in the luxury class, there was no caries of the teeth. In the later luxury class caries was as common as it now is in Europe.

    But I know of no such study or possible study of plant diseases in the past and now. Nor do I know of any study of plants as they are in a locality where they have long been cultured under like conditions and of the same plants subjected to conditions that are unfamiliar, in which, therefore, their instincts have been outstripped.

    Plant life is by its nature less mobile than man's. Movement is only by winged or carried seed, and is limited. Therefore one would expect the making of plant-life in man's image would have a far more serious effect on plants than on man. Indeed, I sometimes marvel that plants have survived some of the great disturbances to which they have been subjected. It argues much for the scientific skill of man that he should have been able to bring about so many changes at all. But, nevertheless, nature hits back, and she hits back with disease.

    From these changes, except for the introduction of the potato in about 1892, the plant-life of Hunza has been exempt.

    The unchanged conditions include one of supreme importance, that of food for the plant. This has continued century after century with the utmost constancy.

    The chief factors of plant-food have been two.

    Firstly, there is the continuous slight renewal of the soil by a sprinkling of the black glacier-ground sand, which is brought to the fields by the aqueducts.

    Secondly, there is the direct preparation by man of food for the plants, given in the form of manure.

    The Hunza, in their manuring, use everything that they can return to the soil. They carefully collect the cattle manure and store it in the byres. They collect all vegetable parts and pieces that will not serve as food to either man or beast, including such fallen leaves as the cattle will not eat, and mix them with the dung and urine in the byres. They use the human sewage after keeping it for six months. They take silt from special recesses built in their irrigating channels. They collect the ashes of their fires. All these they mix together and make into a compost. They also spread alkaline earth from the hills on their vegetable fields on days when the fields are watered.

    The act of manuring is so important in its bearing upon agriculture that the subject needs elaboration. As its classical representatives are the Chinese, it will be their method we will now study. It is to be noted that the Hunza claim to have received culture from Baltistan, the inhabitants of which are Tibetans.

    The Chinese have pursued their method of manuring for a period of time which makes modern progress appear an infant, a period which permits the late Professor F. H. King to call his classic of description and understanding by the really stupendous title of Farmers of Forty Centuries.

    The principle of the method is that of the forest and prairie. It is that everything that comes from the soil, whether it passes through animals or not, is returned to the soil. Nothing is lost, all is preserved. Nothing foreign is intruded, but day by day, year by year, century by century, is the local transference of death to life again. At one time each piece of matter is dead, but its death is but the awaiting of the time when it will be restored to the living by way of plant food.

    The Chinese manure or compost is made of everything that can be collected which once got its life from the soil, directly or indirectly. They are mixed together until they form a black friable substance which is readily spread upon the fields. King describes a number of different processes he saw in different parts of China. One he describes as being carried out in compost pits at the edge of a canal, a process entailing "tremendous labour of body and amount of forethought." Four months before his visit men had brought waste from the stables of Shanghai, a distance of fifteen miles by water. This they had deposited upon the canal bank between layers of thin mud dipped from the canal, corresponding to silt collected in and taken from the recesses in the Hunza aqueducts, and left to ferment. The eight men at King's visit had nearly filled the compost pit with this stable refuse and canal silt. The pit was in a field in which clover, with its peculiar power of taking nitrogen from the air, was in blossom. This was to be cut and piled to a height of five to eight feet upon the compost in the pit, and also saturated layer by layer with canal mud. It would then be allowed to ferment twenty to thirty days until the juices set free had been absorbed by the winter compost beneath and until the time that the adjacent land had been made ready for the coming crop. The compost would then be distributed by the men over the field.

    At another time he saw a compost pit within a village in which had been placed all the manure and waste of the houses holds and streets, all stubble and waste roughage of the fields, all ashes not to be applied directly, mixed up with some soil. Sufficient water was added to keep the contents of the pit saturated and to promote their fermentation. All fibres of organic material have to be broken down, which may require working and re-working, with frequent additions of water and stirring for aeration. Finally the mixture becomes a rich complete fertilizer. It is then allowed to dry and is finely pulverised before it is spread upon the land.

    Every foot of land, says King, is made to provide food, fuel or fabric. "The wastes of the body, of fuel and fabric, are taken back to the field; before doing so they are housed against waste from weather, intelligently compounded and patiently worked at through one, three or even six months, in order to bring them into the most efficient form to serve as manure for the soil or as feed for the crop."

    There is no human waste. "While the ultra-civilized Western elaborates destructors for burning garbage at a financial loss and turns sewage into the sea, the Chinese uses both for manure," reported Dr. Arthur Stanley, Health Officer of Shanghai in 1899, and quoted by King. "He wastes nothing while the sacred duty of agriculture is uppermost in his mind. And in reality recent bacterial work has shown that fecal matter and house refuse" (prepared as it usually is in China in hard-burned glazed terra-cotta urns and in Japan in sheltered cement-lined p