708 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
as for power to resist disease. Meat, fowl, and fish are concen- 
trated forms of nitrogenous proteid nourishment. Then, again, 
a purely vegetable diet must of necessity be bulky, because so 
much water is included therein, particularly when cooked, 
and so much unassimilable cellulose is bound up therewith ; 
whilst the limited amount of proteid sustenance present is 
diluted by a disproportionate quantity of starch. If boiling 
water is poured upon the starch grains they swell up, and burst, 
so that the true starch escapes from between the layers of 
cellulose. It is this rupture of the starch grains which is sought 
to be effected by the proper cooking of vegetable foods. The 
mineral constituents of most vegetables increase the solubility 
in the system of certain gouty salts (bi-urate), but the mineral 
constituents of meat tend to diminish this solubility. Dr. Luff, 
a practised experimentalist, gives the first place in this direction 
to Spinach against a gouty habit of body; Brussels Sprouts, 
and French Beans come next on his list, being followed by 
Cabbage, Turnip-tops, Turnips, and Celery. It is now under- 
stood that vegetables and plants obtain the mineral salts, and 
earth salts on which they depend for their nourishment, through 
the agency of (microscopical) organisms known as nitro-bacteria ; 
these attack the surface of rocks wherein potash, and iron are 
contained, and disintegrate in a similar way all dead organic 
matters, dead animals, dung, etc., dissociating the compact 
atoms, and thus producing nitrates, whereby the foundation 
of all fertility is laid. 
Thomas Tryon (Way to Health, 1650) wrote: “ Raw herbs 
are a sublime kind of food, and are to be preferred to 
that which is boiled, for the pure volatile spirit in the herbs 
cannot endure the violence of the fire, but in boiling a great 
part of this is evaporated. For which cause boiled herbs 
lie heavier, and colder in the stomach than do raw herbs, 
which is scarcely believed by many persons. For, they that 
love boiled herbs do generally eat much flesh with them, 
and so cannot discern the operation these have.” ‘ The 
strength, and comforting quality of everything consists princi- 
pally in the spirituous parts, which are lost by evaporation in 
the boiling, and therefore the substance becomes of quite another 
nature. That lively tincture, and spirituous part which it 
possessed whilst raw, can never be recovered by all the ingredients 
which nature, or art can afford. Do not all creatures eat their 
