DAILY MEALS.] 



CHEMISTRY. 



359 



90. Breakfast, Dinner, and Supper. Although during 

 sleep the metamorphosis of tissue is less rapid, yet the 

 eight or ten hours which commonly elapse between supper 

 and breakfast, are sufficient to produce all those pheno- 

 mena of sanguineous impoverishment comprised under 

 the name of hunger. Hence, the meal breaking this 

 state of fasting is called breakfast. 



To the breakfast succeed the anxieties and labours of 

 the day. Bread, therefore, or bread-and-butter, in the 

 morning is a very proper food, as it is digested with 

 sufficient ease, and yet so slowly as not too suddenly to 

 overload the blood and brain with alimentary principles. 

 Tea or coffee suitably prepares for the attention and exer- 

 cise of judgment, and is more or less required by the labour 

 of all classes. And from the consideration that tea more 

 especially promotes the combination and the development 

 of thought, while coffee excites the imagination likewise, 

 a rational explanation is obtained for the fact, that in 

 some countries, as for instance in Holland, those classes 

 of society whose labour is chiefly that of the intellect, 

 take tea for their breakfast, while those which employ 

 both judgment and imagination take coffee. 



91. Combination of Meat with Vegetables. Soup, 

 tables, and meat, are the regular constituents of a 

 European citizen's dinner. We have already explained 

 the daily taking of soup, together with tho meat, 

 'essitated by the general custom of preparing soup 

 from the same meat which is eaten when boiled. In 

 the name section we showed the combination of meat 

 with vegetables or edible roots to be a custom founded 

 upon reason. Meat furnishes what is wanting in vege- 

 tables, and the vegetables dilute what meat contains in 

 too great an abundance. 



It is therefore an unfortunate custom, or a still more 

 unfortunate necessity, that by so many poor families, 

 potatoes, exclusively, should be eaten for dinner. When 

 circumstances render it impossible to eat any meat with 

 vegetables, the dinner ought to consist, as often as 

 practicable, of leguminous seeds, the best of soups being 

 from peas, beans, or lentils. Hence it follows again, 

 that the distress of the poor might be essentially alle- 

 viated by the cultivation of the leguminous plants on 

 so many acres of soil, where potatoes now grow or 

 perish by a destructive disease. 



In those families, however, which have meat on their 

 table some days of the week at least, the meat ought 

 on such occasions to be dished up together with potatoes 

 or vegetables ; while on the other days, the nutritious 

 soups of peas, beans, or lentils, should be used. Such 

 an alternation ought to be laid down as a general rule ; 

 fur however correct the taste of certain housewives may 

 be, in the selection of viands, it happens very often, in 

 the more opulent households of the middle classes, that 

 the meals are very improperly composed. How often 

 does it occur that a meagre soup is followed by nothing 

 but fish and potatoes ! Or, how often is some kind of 

 soup, together with a farinaceous dish, eaten without 

 any addition of meat ! Or a soup from some of the 

 leguminous seeds is taken, and leguminous seeds or fari- 

 naceous dishes follow. 



Whenever possible, meat ought not to be absent from 

 the dinner-table; or if the less readily digestible and 

 less nutritious fish be substituted, an easily digestible 

 and substantial broth, or a nutritious soup of peas or 

 lentils, ought to compensate for the defect. But if 

 beans and farinaceous dishes, or soups of the leguminous 

 seeds, constitute the whole meal, these most nutritious 

 aliments will, by their difficulty of digestion, oppress tho 

 stomach, overload the blood, heat the head, and render 

 it less fit for the ensuing work. 



Pea-oup, therefore, with fish and potatoes, or fish 

 followed by farinaceous dishes, or meat and vegetables, 

 or broth, leguminous seeds and potatoes, or roast meat 

 and salad, are suitable combinations for a good meal. 

 In short, tho more easily digestible albuminous sub- 

 stances ought always to predominate ; and when aliments 

 which are more difficult of digestion form the chief con- 

 stituent of a meal when peas, beans, or farinaceous 

 dishes are taken then soups containing vegetables or 



fruit, ought at least to be added, in order to promote 

 digestion by their admixture of acids or salts. 



But not alone are the right representation and com- 

 bination of alimentary principles to be considered in our 

 meals. Whatever impels our body to a new activity is 

 a stimulant ; and hence, in a wider sense, not only the 

 heating spices, but solid and liquid food in general, are 

 to be regarded as stimulants. It is characteristic of a 

 stimulant, that its effect ceases when its use is repented 

 at too frequent intervals ; and the slighter the irritation, 

 the more readily will its effect become blunted, if the 

 regularity of its influence render the peculiar effect less 

 perceptible ; a diminished susceptibility to the irritation, 

 in consequence of repeated use, establishes the habit ; 

 while, with many kinds of solid and liquid food for 

 instance, with bread, meat, potatoes, water, milk our 

 insensibility to the stimulus does not attain a higher 

 degree than that of becoming accustomed to it ; and 

 while even stronger stimulants, like tea and coffee, beer 

 and wine, are overcome by habit ; with other aliments, 

 the insensibility overpowers the liabit, and almost pro- 

 duces disgust. 



While soup and meat, if taken day after day in the 

 same form, at length become repugnant, it is equally 

 impossible to eat every day the same kind of vegetables, 

 the same farinaceous seeds ; if carrots or saurkrout have 

 to be partaken of even for two or three days in succes- 

 sion, the housewife may expect to meet with dissatisfied 

 faces. This does not proceed perhaps from any bad 

 state of the organs of taste ; but taste is a very appro- 

 priate index of the irritation which the brain and nerves 

 receive from the blood. We know accurately, that meat 

 taken in abundance, conveys more fibrine to the blood, 

 and the starchy aliments more sugar ; and that tho 

 volatile oils of the superior kinds of fruit and of spices, 

 tho organic acids and the several combinations of the 

 different salts of tho vegetables, pass into the mother- 

 juice of the tissues. And if in animals the monotonous 

 manifestations of strength correspond with their uni- 

 form food ; if even in plants the want of sensation 

 harmonises with the simple composition of their not 

 very numerous alimentary principles; must not tho 

 strictest logical sequence of cause and effect trace the 

 agitated life of man, with his actions and passions, and 

 all the numberless shades of sensation and thought, 

 in great part to his variety of solid and liquid food and 

 condiments ? That there exists individualism in cha- 

 racter, becomes possible only through the co-operation 

 of the various aliments, together with the numberless 

 moral and sensible influences which the surrounding 

 material world exercises upon him. 



And as the uniformity of the stimulant, even if re- 

 peated at longer intervals, is prejudicial to its effect, a 

 regular arrangement of dishes, repeated certain days 

 every week, is a custom not to be commended. If a 

 stiff regularity only too clearly betray a commonplace 

 narrowness of mind, such a regular repetition becomes a 

 source of petty formalism ; insensibly, but all the more 

 dangerously, repressing the free movements of the mind. 

 Whoever has watched himself with attention, will often 

 enough have experienced how the refreshing and stimu- 

 lating effect of a walk is evidently lost if taken for a 

 long time daily at tho same hour. It is the same with 

 uniformity ir. viands ; and while the ancient physicians 

 used actually to assert it to bo useful sometimes to 

 throw the body out of order, in accordance with this 

 doctrine it is perfectly true, that an inflexible regularity 

 of life is by no means compatible with a genial freedom. 



Not seldom do we hear the opinion advanced, that 

 drinking during a meal is an obnoxious habit ; but quite 

 wrongfully; for the gastric j uice may be diluted with a 

 considerable quantity of water without losing its dis- 

 solving power in the slightest degree. Only a super- 

 abundance of water would diminish or arrest the peculiar 

 action of the matters contained in the digestive fluids. 



Large draughts of water, therefore, would be the 

 most injurious with aliments difficult of digestion, like 

 the fats; and hence, drinking of too much water after 

 fat pork, for instance, is properly avoided; but, in 



