368 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



If the specimen composition you send is about your fair, 

 usual average, I should judge that perhaps a couple of 

 whales would be all you would want for the present. Not 

 the largest kind, but simply good middling-sized whales.' " 



By far the largest part of our vegetable foods are obtained 

 from farinaceous seeds of a tribe of the grasses, — the cerealia, 

 — wheat, oats, barley, rye, corn and rice. Next in importance 

 are the leguminosse, — beans and pease ; these are of very 

 high nutritive value, but hard to digest. An old Scotch 

 maxim — "Beans stick to the ribs" — expresses their stay- 

 ing qualities. Beans and pease are nearly alike in chemical 

 composition. They contain, of nitrogenous matter, about 

 twenty-five per cent., and this is chiefly legumine, or vege- 

 table casein ; of starch, fifty-five per cent. ; of cellulose, fatty 

 and mineral matter, from two to three per cent, of each ; 

 and water, ten per cent. ; besides an important ferment 

 called diastase. There are many varieties cultivated. They 

 are eaten in a green, unripe state, cooked by boiling, and are 

 highly prized for their succulent qualities. Baked beans 

 and bean porridge are old English forms of cooking that will 

 hold their high place in the chemistry of the kitchen so long- 

 as the old rhyme, 



" Bean jjorridge hot, bean porridge cold, 

 Bean porridge best when nine days old," 



is remembered among men. By the action of the diastase 

 on the starch, converting it into sugar, the porridge becomes 

 sweeter and better just as expressed in the rhyme. 



The cereals agree in their general character, but they 

 differ widely in the relative amount of alimentary principles 

 they contain. They all have nitrogenized protein com- 

 pounds, — albumen, caseine and fibrine ; and non-nitrogenized 

 elements, — starch, dextrine, sugar, fatty material, mineral 

 phosphates of lime and magnesia, and salts of potash, soda, 

 and silica, and the ferment diastase ; and several of them have 

 gluten. 



They have, of nitrogenous matter, from 7 per cent, in rice 

 to 23 per cent, in wheat; from 61 per cent, of starch in oats 

 to 89 in rice; from 1 per cent, of dextrine in rice to 15 in 

 rye ; from .80 per cent, of fat in rice to 6 in corn ; from .90 



