PROCEEDINGS OF THE POLYTECHNIC ASSOCIATION. 527 



books, that the better food is dissolved before it is eaten, the 

 easier it dissolves or digests in the stomach, and the more readily 

 it is assimilated into animal organization. Among those who 

 make the most intelligent efforts to apply the principles of modern 

 organic chemistry to the arts of selecting, preserving and cook- 

 ing food for mankind, I usually find the following theories and 

 details pursued, viz : They presume that the fermentation of 

 bread prepares it to dissolve more readily in the stomach. They 

 are also of opinion that it changes a part of the flour into starch, 

 and thence into alcohol ; and another part into butyric acid. 

 And because the very intense heat of the baking drives off both 

 the alcohol and the focta3 butyric acid, they, therefore, recom- 

 mend the consumers of such bread to regain the alcohol from 

 brandy, wine or beer, and the butyric acid from butter, to be 

 eaten on the bread. Again, they believe that beef, and all other 

 flesh, not corned down, should be stored until incipient putrefac- 

 tion takes place, so that it may be more tender to dissolve in the 

 stomach ; and when flesh is so intensely roasted or baked as to 

 expel the. fat, they require that this extracted fat should be used 

 as gravies, suet puddings or shortening to pastries or biscuits. 

 Instead of eating ripe grapes, they tell us to ferment their juices 

 into wine, and take the grape sugar in toddy, and the tartaric 

 acid in cream of tartar, soda biscuits. Moreover, in my opinion, 

 they actually attempt to enrich beef and hams of pork, while 

 salting them, by using saltpetre, which is nitrate of potash. 

 Others put sugar into bread, to replace that which is transformed 

 into alcohol by the bakers' fermentation. By various other mod- 

 ifications of their theory of chemically preserved and improved 

 organic materials of food, we find many extracting and drying 

 the various substances of vegetables and meats, as starch, sugar, 

 preserves, vinegar or salt pickles, condensed milk, concentrated 

 soups, and various jellies and syrups. For analogous reasons, 

 others feed to cattle, hogs, or poultry, distillery slop, grain or 

 meal damaged by water, in storage or transportation, mow-burned 

 hay and unthreshed grain, frozen and rotten potatoes and cab- 

 bages, and mouldy bread, crackers and maccaroni, and thus pro- 

 duce a very tender and cheap beef, veal, poultry, and very pecu- 

 liar tasting butter, eggs and milk. 



I admit that animals derive all their constituents of growth 

 and repairs from the particles, fibres, or cells previously built 

 up in vegetable organization, like the bricks in a house ; but it 



