There is no knowledge so valuable in its relation to health as that which enables one to read health bulletins by means of the excreta.
Different foods contain different elements of waste material and to be able to identify or judge the economic value of food previously consumed a knowledge of its digestion-ash is essential.
A child should be taught the difference between healthy and unhealthy excreta in order to be on guard at the first warning of disorder, rather than be allowed to remain ignorant until disease has taken firm hold of the system. The knowledge is not complicated and can be easily acquired by even young children.
When the possibility of perfect protection in the matter of nutrition is generally known, one mission of the physician will be to teach prevention of abuses of feeding by evidence of the excreta.
The healthy fæces of many wild animals is comparatively dry, odourless and cleanly; and a farm barn yard or a decently kept city stable is not an offence to even prudish prejudice.
Not so the vicinage of an open receptacle for the waste of human indigestion.
In animals, offensive egesta are evidence of digestive disturbance owing to some unintelligent feeding on the part of attendants; in humans the cause and effect of offensive excreta are the same.
When a race-or work-animal shows digestive disturbance the least intelligent owner or keeper knows that it is not fit for work or racing, and yet this symbol of unfitness is common to the human race.
One of the most noticeable and significant results of economic nutrition gained through careful attention to the mouth-treatment of food, or buccal-digestion, is, not only the small quantity of waste obtained but its inoffensiveness. Under best test-conditions the ashes of economic digestion have been reduced to one-tenth of the average given as normal in the latest text-books on Physiology. The economic digestion-ash forms in pillular shape and when released these are massed together, having become so bunched by considerable retention in the rectum. There is no stench, no evidence of putrid bacterial decomposition, only the odour of warmth, like warm earth or "hot biscuit." Test samples of excreta, kept for more than five years, remain inoffensive, dry up, gradually disintegrate and are lost. The following observation by an eminent eye specialist and _litterateur_ illustrates the opening paragraph of this chapter.