ON THe PEACE Or Bist 
IN A 
HARD-WORKING DIET. 
THE astonishment of Molicere’s much-quoted M. 
Jourdain in ‘Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,’ on learning 
that “ prose,” of which he so wanted to know the mean- 
ing, was what he had been talking all his life, might We live on 
Carbon, 
probably find a parallel in the minds of many people, HIdees 
if, on asking what Carbon, Hydrogen and Nitrogen Nitrogen. 
mean, they for the first time learnt they had been 
living on them all their lives—that though we find 
them doing many other things in the world besides 
being our food, our bodies are to a large extent made 
up of them—and—that it is the union of them in 
our bodies with the Oxygen we breathe that gives us 
the power to do any work at all, that keeps up our 
warmth, maintains our circulation, and performs other 
functions essential to our animal life. 
If they further learned how close seems to be the And the 
j amounts of 
connection between the power to do hard work of them we re- 
See J quire vary 
different degrees and the proportions of Carbon, with the 
amount of 
Hydrogen, and Nitrogen taken in food, and that work we do. 
many of our public dietaries have been for some years 
past calculated on the knowledge obtained about this 
