(2) The defects of nutrition that assist the development of the neuralgic tendency are often the consequence of a system which, it is to be hoped, is to a large extent becoming effete, but which, nevertheless, survives in sufficient vigor and extent to demand express reprobation. It was till lately the general, and it is still a too common practice, to keep children and young persons on a very insufficient allowance of the most important elements of food; the state of things in this respect, both in public and private schools, in the first half of the present century, is a lasting reproach to the medical practitioners of those days, who scarcely lifted a finger to amend it, even when they did not expressly approve it, under the influence of absurd theories about the dangers of excessive "grossness of blood." It is indeed amazing that, with the palpable fact staring them in the face, of the rapid and incessant additions to tissues which are being made by children and young people, medical men should have failed to perceive the necessity for supplies of food practically unlimited except by the capacity of digestion. Yet this seems hardly ever to have been thought of, and the unfortunate results seem scarcely to have been noticed, except when they led to emaciation or consumptive disease. But the effects were perhaps even more disastrous where, with a maintenance of a fair amount of muscular nutrition, there was only a little dyspepsia, and perhaps some slight tendency to nervousness, to show that anything was wrong. The children who were born of strong and healthy parents, may have suffered comparatively little from this regimen as regards their nervous system, but those who were born of neurotic ancestors undoubtedly suffered extensively. The crisis of puberty was, in such ill-nourished children, too frequently the signal for an explosion of epilepsy, chorea, or neuralgia; and too often the mischief was yet further increased by a most injudicious medical treatment, including a deterioration rather than an improvement in the already insufficient dietary system. At the present day, however, we may fairly hope that common sense is prevailing, so as to put an end to this mischief as regards the children of the upper and middle classes. Unfortunately, with the poor a similar ill-nourishment of the young is too often inevitable, and the consequences are constantly to be traced in enfeeblement of the nervous system, of which neuralgia is a pretty common result.