COFFEE AND MANDRAGORA

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 260, 3 August 1928, Page 16

COFFEE AND MANDRAGORA

One of the chief delights in living nowadays is the continual discovery that nothing is what we were last taught it was. Upon all. our simple habits this disintegrating process falls but with most violence upon our meat and drink. One only certainly exists —we do not know what is good for us or what bad (says the London “Daily Telegraph"). The last example comes from Paris. A famous professor of psychology has felt it his duty to investigate coffee. Why psychologists should know more about coffee than anyone else does we cannot tell,, but the divisions of the sciences are among the things which continually do change. But it ap pears that there has lately been some criticism of coffee iu France. Those who have never shared the conventional respect for the coffee of the Continent may smile, but the point of attack is not the taste, it is the deleterious effect. Even in France now they are reduced to talking about what is good for them. Dr. Vachet has declared that it is all nonsense to say coffee does you harm. On the contrary, it “has a beneficial action, provoking an organic stimulation that lasts for only half an hour at the outside. This would seem to be the faint praise which damns, but what the doctoY means is that coffee cannot keep any man awake. We would try to believe it. Such, no doubt', is it's beneficence, the brevity of its organic stimulation, on Dr. Vachet. AU the boasts of our ancestor-) of their night work on wet towels and black coffee may be vain. It may be your coffee should rank with liiandragora and all the drowsy syrups of the East. But still the wonder grows why these men of science should expect our poor organisms to behave like their noble frames. We have learnt by experience—painful and otherwise —what most of the common substances of diet do to us. Why should we abandon what we know for what we are told?