FASTING.

Otago Witness, Issue 1890, 10 February 1888, Page 32

FASTING.

Chossat reckons from 15 to 18 days as tbe average period during which animals are able to resist inanition. The extreme limits of endurance, however, are very variable, fat animals and cold-blooded animals resisting a much longer time than the others. Take, as examples of the former, creatures that hibernate, such as the bear, marmot, &c, and of the latter, frogs, and tortoises. As everbody knows, a bear or a prairie dog will remain sev?ral months without food ; a tortoise encased in plaster of Paris will emerge from its enforced domicile after three months in fairly good condition. Thus the hibernating animal, the reflex sense of hunger being latent, feeds upon itself; and as it has sufficient fat stowed up to nourish it until the conclusion of its winter sleep, it does not succumb. In certain conditions of the nervous system, man is enabled to suppress the sensation of hunger, and to live by autonutrition, or feeding on himself, and also by a sort of hibernation with or without the element of dormancy. All specialists on diseases of the nervous system have under observation hysterical or insane patients who remain for weeks and months without food, and yet maintain a tolerably good physical condition. Again, influences purely physical, such as powerful moral emotions, without any diseased condition existing in the individual subjected to them, may also lessen the denutrition that results from deprivation of food. In this connection, Henri de Parville cites the experiment of an alchemist named Duchanteau, who imagined that by depriving himself of nourishmeut for 40 days he could produce the philosopher's stone. Duchanteau withstood the deprivation during 26 days, and djdn't die.