CHEMICAL SCIENCE. 245 



Although the new bread has been as yet but little more than experimentally 

 introduced to public consumption, I have already received from members of 

 my own profession, who have recommended it in their practice, as well as 

 from non-professional persons, accounts of the really astonishing results 

 that have followed its use in cases of deranged digestion and assimilation. 

 Private gentlemen have sought interviews with me to record the history of 

 their recovery to health, after } T ears of suffering and misery, by the simple 

 use of the bread as a diet. And cases are rfbw numerous that have been 

 communicated to me by medical men of position, in which certain distressing 

 forms of dyspepsia, which had remained intractable under every kind of 

 treatment, have yielded as if by magic almost immediately after adopting 

 the use of the aerated bread. 



I am disposed to attribute the beneficial effects of the new bread to two 

 causes. The one to the absence of the prejudicial matters imparted to ordi- 

 nary bread by the process of fermentation; and the other to the presence in 

 the bread, unchanged, of that most essential agent of digestion and assimi- 

 lation, cerealin. 



I believe the prejudicial matters imparted to bread by fermentation to be 

 chiefly two, acetic acid and the yeast-plaut. The first is produced in large 

 quantities, especially in hot weather, by the oxydation, by atmospheric con- 

 tact, of the alcohol produced. The second is added when the baker forms 

 his sponge, and is also rapidly propagated during the alcoholic fermentation, 

 and cannot of course be afterwards separated from the other materials in the 

 manner that the yeast and other debris of fermentation separate themselves 

 from wine and beer by precipitation in the process of fining. Nor is the life 

 of the .yeast-plant generally destroyed in baking, because it requires to be 

 retained at the boiling point for some time before it is thoroughly destroyed; 

 and bread is generally withdrawn from the oven, for economical reasons, 

 even before the centre of the loaf has reached the temperature of two hun- 

 dred and twelve degrees. It is not difficult to understand how the most 

 painful and distressing symptoms and derangements may follow the use of 

 bread in which the yeast-plant is not thoroughly destroyed previous to inges- 

 tion, and in those cases of impaired function in which the peculiar antiseptic 

 influence of the stomachal secretions is deficient, and is incapable of prevent- 

 ing the development of the yeast-plant in the stomach, and the setting up of 

 the alcoholic fermentation to derange the whole process of digestion and 

 assimilation. 



The presence of cerealin in bread is as beneficial as that of acetic acid and 

 the yeast-plant is prejudicial. Digestion, or the reduction of food, is evidently 

 essentially dependent on the action of a class of substances which chemists, 

 for want of a better term, have called ferments ; to these substances belong 

 pepsin, ptyaline, emulsin, diastase, and cerealin. These are evidently types 

 of a very numerous class, which act by producing those molecular changes 

 in organic substances in which digestion consists; and since the purpose of 

 digestion, or solution, is to prepare from heterogeneous substances taken as 

 food a chyle, which shall not only when absorbed present all the elements of 

 healthy blood, but shall, previous to absorption, possess the properties which 

 will constitute it the proper stimulus to the functional activity of the lacteals, 

 it would appear to be necessary that each distinct substance taken as food 

 should be furnished, not with its simple chemical solvent, but with that 

 peculiar form of solvent, or ferment, which alone can carry it through those 

 molecular changes which shall terminate in the production of healthy chyle. 



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