THE FOOD QUESTION. 83 



SO importaut, I say, has this investigation become as to have incUiced 

 the German government to undertake its completion, and to pub- 

 lish dietaries, each of which gives the right proportions of the dif- 

 ferent kinds of food necessary to sustain a working man, according 

 to the chemical formula established by Professor Voit, together 

 with the prices at which such food can be purchased. 



The tables of these dietaries have already been published in this 

 country, having been translated by Professor William O. Atwater, 

 of Middletown, Ct. ; who kindly furnished them. to me to be in- 

 cluded in the appendix to my address, lately given at the meeting 

 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held 

 at Ann Arbor, Michigan, in August last. Copies of that address 

 I have not now available ; a new edition is about to be printed, 

 but the same tables ma}' be found in the Report of the meeting of 

 the Chiefs of the Bureaus of Statistics, of which copies can prob- 

 ably be obtained from Col. Wright, the Chief of the Massachu- 

 setts Bureau. 



Following this line of investigation, other dietaries have been 

 computed (if we may use that expression) b}^ Sir Lyon Playfair 

 and others in England, while a vast deal of most useful work has 

 also been accomplished in the same direction b}^ Professor At- 

 water, of which the results are in print. 



These several dietaries of home and foreign origin are interest- 

 ing, not onlj' because they tend to reduce the nutrition of commu- 

 nities to a science, but also because they furnish us a fairly adequate 

 standard of comparison as to the relative conditions of working 

 people in German}-, in England, and in this couutr}'. They are 

 suggestive of future political and social complications, of which 

 the mutterings can be heard all over Europe. If you will com- 

 pare the dietaries already given by Professor Atwater with those 

 of Professor Voit, you will observe how inferior is the subsistence 

 which can be bought in Germany at a cost of about eighteen cents 

 a da}', even if it be theoretically sufficient, as compared to the very 

 much more generous diet which can be purchased in this section 

 of the United States at the same cost. 



Now let us consider the connection between the nutrition of the 

 man and what we may call the nutrition of the soil. Human life, 

 animal life, and plant life are but three names for the conversion 

 of certain forces ; these forces, for convenience, we call protein, 

 or nitrogen, the correlative of muscle ; fats, or the correlative of 



