DISCOVERY 



A MONTHLY POPULAR 

 JOURNAL OF KNOWLEDGE 



v^ 



Vol. IV, No. 41. MAY 1923. 



PRICE Is. NET. 



DISCOVERY. A Monthly Popular Journal of Know- 

 ledge. 



Edited by Edward Liveing, B.A., Rothersthorpe, 

 Northampton, to whom all Editorial Communications 

 should be addressed. (Dr. A. S. Russell continues to 

 act as Scientific Adviser.) 



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Editorial Notes 



The wise man looks on food as one of the reasonable 

 pleasures of existence ; the learned man as an ever 

 elusive mystery of chemical changes ; the diet- 

 reformer as a kind of obstacle race, where obscure 

 vetoes forbid a straightforward and hopeful progress 

 from soup to savoury. In these daj^s, when the pro- 

 duce of the uttermost earth comes to our tables in 

 tins and bottles, when nearly every food has under- 

 gone a course of more or less drastic " treatment " 

 before it is deemed suitable, the wise man might well 

 take a leaf from the book of his learned and his appre- 

 hensive fellows, and consider more deeply the merits 

 of his diet. "Hare, a black meat," said old Robert 

 Burton.^ " Melancholy and hard of digestion, it breeds 

 incuhus, often eaten, and causeth fearful dreams." 

 But how would he have looked on rabbit which came 

 frozen from the Antipodes ! ' ' That which Pytha- 

 goras said to his scholars of old may be for ever 

 applied to all melancholy men — A fabis abstinite — 

 eat no peas or beans." Pork is "too moist, full 

 of humours " — and with what terrible denunciations 

 might he have visited them, had he met them united 

 in a tin ? True, Robert Burton must have been a 

 delicate eater, for only carp — and that not with 

 certainty, for is it not a "slimy nutriment"? — and 

 dill, balm, and succory appealed to his learned and 

 1 Anatomy of Melancholy. 



critical palate as righteous food. But, if we substitute 

 the danger of chemical contamination for his incubus, 

 the danger of the destruction of vitamins for his 

 melancholy, and the numberless physical disablements 

 which foUow improper feeding for the humours which 

 menaced him, we may well feel inclined to view our 

 modern kitchen cupboard with his stern disapproval. 



The full-blooded, thorough-going vegetarian is a 

 fairly rare individual, and the question of the best 

 relative proportions in our diet will probably always 

 be solved for the majority by personal taste, and quite 

 satisfactorOy solved. But the problems of adequate 

 feeding are more subtle than the mere question of 

 how much fat and lean Jack Spratt and his wife may 

 care to eat. Professor Hopkins, of Cambridge Uni- 

 versity, in his epoch-making experiments on the 

 feeding of rats, proved that the presence of many 

 substances, minute in their quantity, was vital for 

 successful nurture. There is no certainty yet as to 

 whether preserved foods contain some of these sub- 

 stances at all, although the wholesale experiments 

 which the Army underwent in the late war proved 

 that " bully beef " undoubtedly has a value, and even 

 a charm of its own, if eaten with reasonable discretion. 

 Bacterial contamination is so rare that the disaster in 

 Scotland last year stood out as a notable exception. 

 Chemical strangers in food are perhaps a greater 

 danger ; the cumulative effect of small doses of a 

 poisonous substance may be by no means negligible. 

 We are as a community dependent on the unceasing 

 activities of Government authorities for our safety in 

 ensuring the purity of our food ; but the determina- 

 tion of the essential factors in diet remains the func- 

 tion of the biological investigator, and is in fact 

 among the most important duties which he is called 

 upon to fulfil to-day. 



***** 



The confidence with which we habitually use phrases, 

 whose origin and exact meaning eludes even the 

 curiously-minded who inquire into the mystery, 

 is a very wonderful thing. There was, not long ago, 

 a correspondence in the Observer as to what exactly 



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