Judge — September 27, 1924 — page 20: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Best Time for Family Quarrels by Don Herold “Dest quarrel at mealtime,” is one of the supposedly scientific pieces o! in “Keep- ing Up with Science,” edited by Edwin E. Slosson (Harcourt,Brace). Name a better time, Mr. Slosson. And what else do you suggest that a family do at mealtime? At no other time of the day is the entire family together and so comparatively unoceupied and in better position to quarrel. At luncheon, the family can review quarrelsomely what it has done in the morning. At the evening meal the family can not only review quarrelsomely what it has done during the afternoon but can plan quarrelsomely what it is going to do during the evening. The family can go on and eat as it quarrels. Would Mr. Slosson have father come home in the middle of the afternoon and call the family together for a quarrel at 3.45? Furthermore, the members of the family are hungrier at mealtime and therefore in better trim for a good quarrel. One of the fine technical points of successful quarreling is to quarrel on an empty stomach; the best quarrelers are careful to get their quarrels started and well under way before the soup course. Pshaw! There simply is no other time as good as mealtime for When the Dear Things Vote This book at meal-T MmMlergorer quarreling. The fact that there is so much quarreling at mealtime proves something—man’s instincts are correct in some things, science to the contrary. Families quarrel at mealtime because generations of families have found that that is the best time to quarrel. And the scientific data with which Mr. Slosson backs up his advice can easily be shot full of holes (by one who has at heart the welfare of the art of quarreling). It seems that some scientists fed a friendly cat a,good meal of barium sulphate, a substance opaque to X-rays. While the cat was digest- " These new deat , make me tn says QuarreynMS — tre) tined I Foy often have I tol? ed, You not ‘a %0 Acad / of the v Ae! ing this, the X-ray showed the rhythmical churning movement of the stomach and intestines. Then the experimenters introduced into the room a noisy dog. Immediately digestion ceased and did not start again for a quarter of an hour. How do we know that the cat did not realize about that time that it had been fed barium sulphate and that that is what made it so mad that its digestion stopped? Who wants to be fed barium sulphate? I don’t know what barium sulphate is, but I am darned if I would digest it for the amusement of a bunch of scien- tists. Maybe it was the presence of the scientists that stopped the cat's digestion. Perhaps the moral is, don’t eat lunch with scientists. And even if it was the dog which made the cat's digestion stop, is that of necessity friendly cat-and-dog quarrel be- tween members of a family? A cat may go into spasms at the introduction of a dog into a room already half full of irritating scientists, but what bearing has that on normal family life and its digestion? Perhaps if you turned a roaring lion into a family dining- room it would stop the digestion of those present. I am not advo- cating quarreling with lions al mealtime. (Right after dinner is the best time for Unt.) So I think these scientists about whom Mr. Slosson writes ought to do some more X-raying. (Continued on page 30) ralogous to a comicbooks.com