314 NOTICES OF THE MEETINGS [May 6, 
it is only to deal with very rough generalities. Admitting that the 
experience of man in diet is worth something, it is possible to arrive 
at some conclusions by the sfatistical method — that is, by accepting - 
experience in diet and analyzing that experience. Take for 
example the one general line of Pauper Diet for the English counties 
placed in the table at the end of this notice. The mode of arriving 
at the result of experience, in the case of paupers, was to collect 
it from every workhouse in the kingdom, and then to reduce it to 
one line. But the labour of this is immense. In the preparation 
of this one line the following work had to be performed in acquiring 
the data, 
Number of Unions applied to : < “| 542 
Number of Explanatory letters sent to them : 700 
Number of Calculations to reduce the results . 47,696 
Number of Additions of the above calculations . 6,868 
Number of Extra hours, beyond the office hours, paid 
to a Clerk for the reduction . . : . 1,248 
The statistical method, besides being very laborious, is extremely 
tedious, and has thus deterred persons from encountering it. In 
giving, therefore, an example of some of the results which have 
been collected within the last few years, they will represent much 
labour, but very little or no originality. 
The Lecturer then alluded shortly to the conditions in nutrition, 
which must be borne in mind in looking at these results. It was 
now admitted that the heat of the body was due to the combustion 
of the unazotised ingredients of food. Man inspires annually about 
7cewt. of oxygen, and about 3th of this burns some constituent and 
produces heat. The whole carbon in the blood would thus be 
burned away in about three days, unless new fuel were introduced 
as food. The amount of food necessary depends upon the number of 
respirations, the rapidity of the pulsations, and the relative capacity 
of the lungs. Cold increases the number of respirations and heat 
diminishes them; and the Lecturer cited well known cases of the 
voracity of residents in Arctic Regions, although he admitted, as 
an anomaly, that the inhabitants of tropical climates often show 
a predilection for fatty or carbonaceous bodies. He then drew 
attention to the extraordinary records of Arctic Dietaries shown in 
the table, which, admitting that they are extreme cases, even in the 
Arctic Regions, are nevertheless very surprising. 
Dr. Playfair then alluded to the second great class of food ingre- 
dients, viz., those of the same composition as flesh. - Beccaria in 
1742 pointed to the close resemblance between these ingredients of 
flesh, and asked ‘‘Is it not true that we are composed of the same 
substances which serve as our nourishment?” In fact the simplicity 
of this view is now generally acknowledged; and Albumen, Gluten, 
Casein, &e., are now recognized as flesh-formers in the same sense 
