50 THE LAND WE LIVE ON 



of animal nutrition, and tlie composition of foddercrops, 



and food-stuffs in general. A large amount of experi- 

 mental work has been done in this respect in Europe and 

 in the United States, yet many esssential points are still 

 shrouded in mystery. Wolff was the first to publish a 

 special work on " farm foods,'^^ in 1864, chiefly based on 

 the researches of von Voit, and Pettenkofer, carried out 

 at Munich, and his own work at the Agricultural College 

 at Hohenheim. 



In tlie analysis of fodders very little progress has 

 been made, and the original " Wende " method, introduced 

 by Henneberg in 1864, is still largely used, although the 

 results can be hardly called satisfactory. 



Of particular importance are the analyses of our 

 staple foods, wheat and wheaten flour. As most of the 

 wheat is used in the form of flour, the milling and bread- 

 making qualities are of chief value. With the introduction 

 of improved methods of milling, many of our old popular 

 ideas have been exploded, and the notion that dark- 

 looking and whole-meal bread are more nutritious than white 

 bread is proved to be a fallacy. Our modern millers pro- 

 duce not only a whiter but a more nutritious and more 

 easily digested flour than their predecessors. Professor 

 Snyder, of the University of Minnesota, has clearly shown 

 that from nearly every class of wheat the white flour of 

 commerce yielded more nutriment than the whole-meal, 

 and that the addition of bran made flour more indiges- 

 tible. The value of flour is practically judged by 

 bakers by its strength, or the capacity to produce a bold, 

 large- volumed, and well-risen loaf. We do not know yet 

 what really constitutes the strength of flour, or how^ many 

 factors take part in its production. Quantity, composition 

 and character of the insoluble proteins — Gluten — of the 

 flour are some of the principal factors, but others are of 

 equal importance; and the new fact made known by A. D. 

 Hall that, although individual flours may be of poor 

 strength and produce poor loaves, a blending of such flour 

 nevertheless produced an excellent loaf ; but only a mix- 

 ture of the flours in certain proportions gave results equal 

 to a sample of strong Manitoba flour. Again, it w^as shown 

 that the strength varied if the wheats were harvested half 

 ripe or dead ripe. These investigations prove the practical 



