Scientific researches have found that walking fast can improve the function of the heart system and respiratory organs, lower the quantity of cholesterol in blood and prevent high blood pressure. Furthermore, in a survey conducted by Japanese scientists in a village known for a large number of old people enjoying long life, it is found that the people there have the habit of walking fast.

This walking fast can complimented very well with the specific medical Qigong practice which is “Walking As Fast As The Wind” & “Sitting As Stable As A Bell”.

Walking as fast as the wind here means to walk fast with strong and vigorous strides (how far the distance to walk would be in accordance with his/her physical ability.) The rationale being after walking one is full of vigor, feel completely relaxed mentally and physically and the symptoms of disease disappear or become fewer. Of course, initially, the practitioner normally will feel a little tired and have a slight ache at the waist and legs).

“Sitting as stable as a bell” – to be practise before and after the vigorous walking. It means we should sit as stable as a bell. Here, any type of posture can be taken but the body should be upright . When sitting, imagine there is a golden ring of light around the navel. Slightly put the mind on the ring. Sit for a quarter of an hour or shorter if you wish.

Why this combination you may ask. This is to do with the saying to combine activity with tranquility or yin and yang concept. The combination of walking as fast as the wind & sitting as stable as a bell makes warding off sickness by walking possible.

The idea is to initially walk one or two times every day each time about half an hour. Walk at an even, steady rhythmic pace, walk in a relaxed state. After you feel that that your mental and physical health as improve, walk longer and faster.

And what about us, humans’.’ You may imagine that it is our natural aesthetic feelings that guard us against feeding on such strange things. Far from it. Don’t forget honey. This tasty and widely-used food is of a rather non-aesthetic origin. The raw material is flower nectar which is first processed in the craws of the foraging bees where cane sugar is partially converted into fruit and grape sugar and then discharged into the honeycomb cells. This is how honey is obtained from flowers.

Even less aesthetic is the origin of honeydew which is collected in vast amounts in Western Germany. This is simply the same excrement of the aphides as the wood ant eats, but, nonetheless, the people of that country consider it to be a great delicacy.

But, ignoring the somewhat exotic tastes of coprophagous creatures, one must admit that they are very useful. They not only make our planet cleaner, but retain valuable organic compounds within a natural cycle, and this is even more important.

It seems that in the past there were fewer coprophagous animals on the globe than now. At any rate they evidently did not cope with their duties. About seven to eight million years ago Europe was inhabited by ichthyosaurs, gigantic predatory reptiles. They were so big, there were so many of them and their reign lasted so long that in some parts of the Earth the ichthyosaurs left rather conspicuous traces of their existence in the form of huge dung heaps.

They say that time exerts an ennobling effect on all things. This is true to a certain extent. Common pine resin which has lain underground for a few million years turned into stone and became noble amber. Over thousands of years the dung of the ichthyosaurs has turned to stone which enhanced it in that its unpleasant smell disappeared. The largest accumulations of coprolite (fossilized excreta) were found in England, not far from York, and in Western Germany where they have long been mined and used to advantage. When finely crushed, coprolite has proved to be a very good fertilizer.

Strange as it may seem, this is not the only use for coprolites. Owing to the fact that they contain much cemented sepia (the ink sacs of fossilized mollusks), fish-scale and undigested bones, the polished surface of coprolite has a beautiful pattern. This explains why fossilized ichthyosaurian dung is used for making various small articles, brooches, beads and other adornments for women.

Indeed, history sometimes works in a very curious way and the whims of women’s fashion are limitless.

At any rate many psychopharmacologists do not think it absolutely absurd to search for a substance which might produce geniuses, stimulate the brain and facilitate educational training and other mental processes. At some time in future this search will probably bear fruit.

Man is an omnivorous creature. Apart from sheer habit, nothing prevents him from adapting to any kind of food. There are few omnivorous species in the animal kingdom, for the majority of them eat a certain kind of food. Some feed on strange things — wood, wool, feathers, squama (fish-scale), or wax — which, on the face of it, do not seem to be very good to eat.

Animals of the same species may sometimes differ widely in their tastes. In a family of mosquitoes the females are blood-suckers because they need protein to produce otisprings, while the males are content with plant food.

Taste frequently changes with age. The evolution of feeding habits is particularly striking in African honey-guides. Those amusing little birds do not make their own nests, but abandon their eggs to other families just as our cuckoos do. The foster-parents feed the future honey-guide with insects, as they do their own offspring. But, when the little nestling grows up and becomes independent, it begins to search for destroyed bee nests and feed choicely on beeswax.

How and why it develops a passion for wax is ditllcult to say since its foster-parents do not teach it, but the honey-guide begins feeding exclusively at the expense of bees and looks for undamaged nests as well. How­ever, it is not strong enough to cope with a bee com­munity on its own and resorts to the help of stronger robbers (honey-badgers at the worst), its loud chirping notifying the local inhabitants and certain animals of its and means ‘eating human flesh’. It is also used to denote animals which feed on their own kind.

An interesting kind of cannibalism can be observed among avian ticks, which are carriers of spirochaetosis, an extremely dangerous disease for birds. When they attach themselves to a bird, the larvae of these mites, the nymphae and the adult insects do not always penetrate into its body. If there are a lot of them, a few always prove to be cannibals; these try to find a female tick or a nymph that has been already sucking blood and attach themselves to it. Sometimes another cannibal attaches itself to the first one, then a third cannibal and so on, making a queue of up to five, all sucking the bird’s blood or victim’s haemolymph from one another. The victim, incidentally, does not react to this onslaught at all. The chain of parasites feeding upon one another does not break apart until all of them have satisfied their hunger. The mites attacked by their fellows remain alive and continue to develop normally.