germ is the egg of the plant. It contains the essence of life. The outer covering of the grain was removed because the public was supposed to favour bread of the greatest whiteness.

Biological chemists have experimented with wholemeal bread and white bread, and they have discovered that rats, mice, birds, and other laboratory animals live, flourish, and beget young when fed exclusively on wholemeal bread, milk, and water, but the same animals will die when fed on white bread. The moral is perfectly obvious to all.

In addition to the mysterious vitamins, and in addition to the numerous mineral elements contained in the outer skins and germ of the grain, the outer skin contains chiefly roughage which is partly broken up in our insides but is mainly excreted by way of the bowel. Now this roughage which has often been regarded as valueless because it is insoluble, is of the very greatest importance to our health and strength. Life is movement. That was already taught by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Stagnation means decay and death. The despised roughage is as indispensable to man and animals as are all the known and unknown substances contained in our food.

The capacity of our stomach and bowels clearly indicates that man was made to live on bulky, not on concentrated, food. The idea that we might carry our dinner about with us in tabloid form in our waistcoat pocket is an absurdity. A well-filled bowel readily empties itself. A bowel containing only a limited quantity of waste matter has no similar impulse. We have been striving to live on concentrated food in the expectation that concentrated food would vastly increase our strength and improve our health. In reality the overrefined and concentrated food-stuffs of civilisation have given us stagnation, constipation, and countless serious diseases which spring from these and which lead to the profound degeneration of our bodies.

The excretions of the human body are eliminated to a very large extent by way of the bowel. Cells are born, decline, and die, and the dead cells have to be got rid of. Now, stagnation in the bowel leads to putrefaction, and the absorption of poisonous matter into the body is followed by general malaise and numerous

diseases which afflict the constipated over-civilised, and which are practically unknown among primitive races leading primitive lives. Among these diseases are appendicitis, diabetes, and cancer.

Nature has a wonderful power of adaptation. The human and the animal body tries to adjust itself to new conditions, but these adjustments have often very undesirable results. The hand of the manual worker becomes callous and horny. The spine of the carrier of heavy burdens becomes bent for the better carrying of the load, and the rubber-like substance between the bones of the spinal column becomes as hard as ivory.

Strength is created by judicious feeding coupled with adequate exercise. Over-feeding accompanied by under-exercise does not strengthen but weakens the body. The leg muscles of a well-fed sedentary man shrink, and when, at the doctor's advice, he abandons over-eating and takes up strenuous exercise, his leg muscles will become strong once more.

Nature has given us strong jaws and exceedingly powerful jaw muscles for the purpose of our using them. If we fail to use our jaws, jaw muscles, and teeth-if we live on soft stuff which may be swallowed without chewing-jaws, jaw muscles, and teeth degenerate. Modern feeding has produced the receding jaw, the narrow nose, the weak throat, decaying teeth, toxic gums and tonsils. These degenerative processes are the reward for living on unsuitable diet.

Every breeder of animals is aware of the supreme importance of strong and healthy teeth, and he encourages the production of healthy and strong teeth, jaws, throats, and the muscles around by supplying his animals with food which will give to their teeth the necessary exercise. Our manufactured food is producing a weak-jawed and almost toothless race, and the stagnation brought about in these structures leads to degeneration, decay, and the creation of poisons which are readily absorbed and which lead to rheumatoid arthritis, heart disease, and other afflictions which are almost unknown among primitive races.

With the vanity of little knowledge we have discarded the most precious food elements, vitamins, minerals, and roughage with which Nature has provided us, and

we have foolishly replaced these precious and indispensable elements with artificial or synthetic dyes, chemical flavourings, chemical preservatives, etc., which are unknown to nature. We are being persuaded by interested parties that the food elements of which we are being deprived are quite unnecessary, if not harmful, and that the chemicals which are being given to us in their stead are quite harmless, if not beneficial. Unfortunately, we know only decades after the event whether great nutritional changes do good or do harm. The mills of God grind slowly.

we were.

The health, strength, and happiness of the race depend largely, very largely, on its nutrition. We are better housed, clothed, and warmed in winter than ever The supply of water, of drains, etc., has been improved beyond the imagination of former generations. On the other hand, our food supply has become far worse than it ever has been. We have an enormous variety of food-stuffs fetched from the ends of the earth. The poorest labourer now has a larger selection of foodstuffs than had the emperors of the past. There is glass in his windows, he has pure water laid on, and he has a bath, but he is being poisoned by the shocking illtreatment of his alimentary canal, which is filled with soft, de-vitaminised, de-mineralised, chemically-coloured, chemically-preserved, and highly-spiced food.

The health, strength, and happiness of the race are being destroyed by faulty nutrition. A far-reaching reform is necessary. We must go back to sound natural food, and replace the stale and pseudo-scientific stuff which is pressed upon us from all sides with the fresh and wholesome food-stuffs of former generations. This is one of the objects of the New Health Society which I have founded in conjunction with other medical men and eminent laymen who are profoundly convinced that the great majority of our diseases are avoidable, and that they are largely due to faulty nutrition. I hope that all who are interested in this most important subject will help us in the heavy task which we have undertaken.

W. ARBUTHNOT Lane.

Art. 7.-DANTE AND GIOTTO.

DANTE is the most interesting person in literature and Giotto is almost or quite the most interesting person in art. The two men were contemporaries. At one time or another, both dwelt in Florence. Were they friends?

Tradition says that they were. To this it has been added that Giotto was Dante's 'dearest friend,' his 'greatest friend'; and in Sir Sidney Colvin's article on Giotto in the Encyclopædia Britannica' we are told that it is recorded that Dante was Giotto's guest at Padua.' Was it so? Can the tradition be accepted without question? What evidence have we that Giotto and Dante were intimate friends or that one was ever the guest of the other?.

Dante was born in the year 1265. According to Vasari, Giotto was born in 1276, and would therefore be Dante's junior by eleven years. So considerable a disparity of age would militate against close friendship.

Antonio Pucci is an earlier and better authority. Born in 1300, and a sort of public trumpeter or herald in Florence, he must have known every one of note in that city. Giotto, during the last few years of his life, was the city architect; and the city architect and the city trumpeter must often have exchanged greetings in the lively streets of Florence. Pucci may have magnified his office at Giotto's funeral. He wrote that Giotto, when he died in January 1337, was seventy years of age. If so, Giotto was born in or about the year 1267, and was only some two years younger than Dante. We can neglect so trifling a disparity.

The bare fact that Giotto painted a portrait of Dante in the palace of the Podestà of Florence can hardly be cited as a proof or indication of intimate personal friendship between the artist and the poet. This-the famous 'Bargello portrait'*-has been much debated, not always

* For the Bargello portrait see 'Portraits of Dante from Giotto to Raffael,' by Richard Thayer Holbrook, London, 1911; 'Il Ritratto di Dante,' G. L. Passerini, Firenze, 1921; 'Studi Danteschi, diretti da Michele Barbi,' Volume Quinto, Firenze, 1922; 'Giotto and Some of his Followers,' by Oswald Sirén, Harvard University Press, 1917; 'Geschichte der Kunst,' von Karl Woermann, Leipzig und Wien, 1918. Dr Woermann, following Crowe and Cavalcaselle, thinks that the portrait was painted in 1301-a

without warmth. Most recent critics accept it, or its ruin, as a genuine work of Giotto-painted not earlier than 1334, or some thirteen or more years after Dante's death. Its value as a portrait seems doubtful. As Mr Holbrook justly remarks, a realistic portrait of so early a date would be without a parallel. It is in a religious painting, in a spacious fresco at a considerable height above the spectator's eye. It contains many figures of angels and saints. Dante is in the foreground, represented as a young man of some five and twenty or thirty years of age. The work is, of course, decorative, and in such a work a realistic portrait would be almost as out of place as in a mosaic or a stained glass window. All that we could expect in it would be a certain similitude not irreconcilable with what we happen to know of the original. Consequently, we can hardly say of the Bargello portrait, 'That is Dante.' The best we can say is 'That is Giotto's idealised recollection of Dante as he was in the prime of his manhood forty years agone.'

We must further remember that Giotto, when decorating the chapel of the Podestà, was executing an official commission, and that some of the leading men in Florence would, possibly, have had views of their own concerning any man whom they would delight to honour by granting him so conspicuous a place on the walls of a building which, after all, was the property of the State; and without their consent or the Podestà's, Dante's portrait would never have been allowed to confront that magnate whenever he chose to worship in his private chapel. The portrait may not, after all, be the personal tribute of a great artist to a great poet. In such a place it is quite as likely to be a token or outward and visible sign of a change of heart in the rulers of Florence. Dante had been condemned as a traitor and had, it must be admitted, done something to justify the condemnation. He had made himself the Roger Casement of Florence. He had written a ferocious letter appealing to the Kaiser of his day to destroy his native city. He had comforted an enemy who was greatly to

date which, as Mr Holbrook had already remarked, is preposterous. Mr E. V. Lucas says probably 1300' ('A Wanderer in Florence,' p. 177, London, 1923). Venturi (Storia dell' Arte Italiana Milan, 1907, v, 448) says 1334 'in all probability.'