3o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



gases which must be separated from the life-sustaining principle by 

 the action of our respiratory organs not by any inorganic process. 

 We can not breathe pure oxygen. For analogous reasons bran-flour 

 makes better bread than bolted flour ; meat and saccharine fruits are 

 healthier than meat-extracts and pure glucose. In short, artificial ex- 

 tracts and compounds are, on the whole, less wholesome than the pala- 

 table products of Nature. In the case of bran-flour and certain fruits 

 with a large percentage of wholly innutritions matter, chemistry fails 

 to account for this fact, but biology suggests the mediate cause : the 

 normal type of our physical constitution dates from a period when the 

 digestive organs of our (frugivorous) ancestors adapted themselves to 

 such food a period compared with whose duration the age of grist- 

 mills and made dishes is but of yesterday. 



We can not doubt that the highest degree of health could only be 

 attained by strict conformity to Haller's rule, i. e., by subsisting exclu- 

 sively on the pure and unchanged products of Nature. In the tropics 

 such a mode of life would not imply anything like asceticism : a meal 

 of milk and three or four kinds of sweet nuts, fresh dates, bananas, and 

 grapes would not clash with the still higher rule, that eating, like every 

 other natural function, should be a pleasure and not a penance. Heat 

 destroys the delicate flavor of many fruits and makes others less digest- 

 ible by coagulating their albumen. But in the frigid latitudes, where 

 we have to dry and garner many vegetable products in order to survive 

 the unproductive season, the process of cooking our food has advan- 

 tages which fully outweigh such objections. Few men with post-dilu- 

 vian teeth would agree wath Dr. Schlemmer that hard grain is preferable 

 to bread. No Bostoner would renounce his favorite dish for a nose- 

 bag full of dry beans. Dried prunes, too, are improved by cooking 

 in taste, at least, and perhaps in digestibility. Besides, we should not 

 forget that the natural taste of such substances, befoi'e they became 

 over-dry, vxis agreeable, or at least not repulsive to our palates. It 

 appears that on week-days the children of Israel indulged their poor in 

 the practice of snatching free luncheons from a convenient corn-field 

 (Matthew xii, 1), and the Imam of Muscat still feeds his soldiers on 

 crude wheat and dhourra-corn, a sort of millet, which many French 

 soldiers learned to eat raw, as their Mameluke captors declined to cook 

 it for them. Even the legumes peas, beans, and lentils pass through 

 a period when they are soft and full of sweet milk-juice, though in 

 their sun-dried over-ripeness they become as tough as wood. In the 

 scale of wholesomeness the place next to Haller's man-food par excel- 

 lence should therefore be assigned to vegetable substances whose pleas- 

 ant taste has been restored by the process of cooking. With this . 

 addition, even an invalid, dieting for his health, need not complain of 

 lack of variety, for the number of nutritious vegetables that can be 

 successfully cultivated as far north as Hamburg and Boston is almost 

 infinite if we include the plants of the corresponding Asiatic latitudes 



