110 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
and, unless we use the brain, thought, it would seem, is unthink- 
able. But the fact has never been shown that an increased 
supply of phosphorus in the food is especially favourable to 
mental effort. “It comes to this on the whole,” says Dr. 
Hutchison, “that the digestibility of a food is of far greater 
concern to a brain-worker than its chemical composition.” 
Furthermore, mental work influences the amount, and nature 
of the food which thereby becomes needed, in a different way 
from muscular labour. Brain work does not appreciably 
increase bodily waste at all, a fact which should be realized, 
and acted upon as regards the daily diet. “*‘ Mark this,” wrote 
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “that I am going to say, for it is as 
good as a working-man’s professional advice, and costs you 
nothing: It is better to lose a pint of blood from your veins 
than to have your nerves tapped. Nobody measures your 
nerve-force as it runs away, nor bandages your brain and marrow 
after the operation.” As to special Brain nutriments, they do not 
exist. Small, and rather frequent meals of easily-digested food 
make up the ideal to aim at, it being remembered that brain 
work is usually also sedentary work. The reduction in the diet 
for mental work should probably affect the starches, sweets, 
and fats, more than the animal foods, fish, fowl, meat, eggs, 
and milk. 
BRANDY (See Corpiats.) 
BREAD. 
BreapD is such an essential food in all countries that it may well 
be called the “Staff of Life.” ‘ Quando deest panis tunc est 
cibus omnis inans :”—“ Tf Bread one needs in vain one feeds.” 
Our Bread was evolved from the Old Eastern flat-cake, which 
was first leavened by the Egyptians, who probably taught the 
Greeks how to make it. From these latter the Romans acquired 
the knowledge, which in due course they passed on to the 
conquered Britons. It is named from the verbal root “ bre owan,” 
to brew, in allusion to the working of the yeast as leaven, thereby 
setting up alcoholic fermentation, with the production of some 
alcohol, and carbonic acid gas, the former of which slowly 
_ evaporates. The common household loaf of our daily Bread 
holds its $ per cent of alcohol. . 
Yeast, “levain” (Saccharomyces cerevisie), consists of fungi 
