14? 



MANUFACTURES AND ARTS, 



THE modern sciences, and particularly chemistry, 

 have been of late successfully applied to the im- 

 provement of several of the useful arts ; and some, 

 in consequence, have undergone almost an entire 

 change. Of the principles of some of them we 

 propose to give a brief description. 



MAKING BREAD. 



Scarcely any nation exists, in which the use of 

 bread is entirely unknown, or something as a sub- 

 stitute for it ; a dry food appearing to be neces- 

 sary to promote the secretion of saliva, in the pro- 

 cess of mastication. 



In Lapland, where they have no corn, they make 

 a kind of bread from dried fish, and of the inner rind 

 of the bark of the pine. In some parts of America, 

 they use, for this purpose, casava, the root of a 

 plant which is poisonous till it is rendered whole- 

 some by the extraction of its acrid juice. In the 

 South Sea islands, the bread-fruit tree affords the 

 natives a substance resembling bread. 



From time immemorial, the farinaceous seeds 

 have been employed as food, and they are the most 

 nutritive of all the vegetables. Few of the alimen- 

 tary substances are used by man in a raw and. 

 crude state ^ almost all undergo some preparation, 

 by which they are rendered more easy of diges- 

 tion, or are more palatable. The application of 



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