It is for this large and increasing class of the community, who are emphatically brain-workers, that a fair proportion of fish furnishes an appropriate food; and as the tendency of civilization is slowly but surely to develop mental activity, and to dispense with laborious handicraft, a good supply of cheap fish becomes every day more important to the community.

For the sedentary man, whatever his calling in life, whose engagements permit him only to take just that moderate amount of muscular exercise which is in all circumstances essential to health; for a great proportion of women, whose engagements are incompatible with much activity in the open air, - the nutritive elements afforded by fish admirably supply an important part of the wants of the body. The moderate amount of flesh-forming material present in fish, and in a form which entails little labour on the digestive organs - for most persons certainly less than meat - and the facility with which fish may be associated with other elements - some fatty matters, with cereals and vegetables, as well as fruits - place it in the first rank of foods in that mixed dietary which is suitable to those who lead more or less the kind of life referred to. I by no means say that it should supersede the use of meat altogether, although it may do so sometimes with advantage; a point only to be determined in each individual instance after some observation and experiment. For in all cases, it is to be remembered - and I repeat the statement on account of its importance - that a person who has habitually eaten meat two or three times daily cannot at once exchange it for fish and cereals or vegetables, without some discomfort, to say the least. All radical changes in diet, even in the right direction, require to be gradually made; the stomach conforms slowly, when long accustomed to deal with highly nitrogenized animal food, to the task of deriving from unaccustomed materials the support necessary to the body. Given time for such modification of function, and it is remarkable - at least, it appears so to those who have not practically studied the subject - that a diet which, if adopted suddenly might fail to be either digestible or nutritious, may become the most wholesome and appropriate which the individual can adopt.

The "intake " and the "output " should correspond.