314 



KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[Nov. 23, 1883. 



I may mention, in reference to this, that when a child or 

 other young animal takes its natural food in the form of 

 milk, the milk is converted into unpressed cheese, or curd, 

 prior to its digestion. 



Supposing that on an average cheese contains only one- 

 half of the G per cent, of phosphate of lime found, as above, 

 in the casein, and taking into consideration the water con- 

 tained in flesh, the bone, (kc, we may conclude generally 

 that one pound of average cheese contains as much nutri- 

 ment as three pounds of the average material of the carcass 

 of an ox or sheep as prepared for sale by the butcher ; or, 

 otherwise stated, a cheese of 20 lb. weight contains as much 

 food as a sheep weighing 60 lb. as it hangs in the butcher's 

 shop. 



Now comes the practical question. Can we assimilate 

 or convert into our own substance the cheese-food as easily 

 as we may the flesh-food ■? 



I reply that we certainly cannot if the cheese is eaten 

 raw ; but have no doubt that we may if it be suitably 

 cooked. Hence the paramount importance of this part of 

 my subject. A Swiss or Scandinavian mountaineer can 

 and does digest and assimilate raw cheese as a staple 

 article of food, and proves its nutritive value by the re- 

 sult ; but feebler bipeds of the plains and towns cannot do 

 the like. 



I may here mention that I have recently made some ex- 

 periments on the dissolving of cheese by adding sufficient 

 alkali (carbonate of potash) to neutralise the acid it con- 

 tains, thus converting the casein into its original soluble 

 form as it existed in the milk, and have partially succeeded 

 both with water and milk as solvents ; but before reporting 

 these results iii detail I will describe some of the practically- 

 established methods of cooking cheese that are so curiously 

 unknown or little known in this country. 



In the fatherland of my grandfather, Louis Gabriel 

 Mattieu, one of the commonest dishes of the peasant who 

 tills his own freehold and grows his own food is a 

 " fondevin " (I cannot explain the etymology of the word, 

 and spell it only by ear, never having seen it in print or 

 writing). This is a mixture of cheese and eggs, the cheese 

 grated and beaten into the egg as in making omelettes, 

 with a small addition of new milk or butter. It is 

 placed in a little pan like a flower-pot saucer, cooked 

 gently, served as it comes ofl" the fire, and eaten from the 

 vessel in which it is cooked. I have made many a hearty 

 dinner on one of these, plus a lump of black bread and a 

 small bottle of genuine, but thin, wine ; the cost of the 

 whole banquet at a little auberge being usually less than 

 sixpence. The cheese is in a pasty condition, and partly 

 dissolved in the milk or butter. I have tested the sustain- 

 ing power of such a meal by doing some very stifl" mountain 

 climbing and long fasting after it. It is rather too good 

 — over nutritious — for a man only doing sedentary 

 work. 



A diluted and delicate modification of this may be made 

 by taking slices of bread, or bread and butter, soaking 

 them in a batter made of eggs and milk — without flour — 

 then placing the slices of soaked bread in a pie-dish, cover- 

 ing each with a thick coating of grated cheese, and thus 

 building up a stratified deposit to fill the dish. The surplus 

 batter may be poured over the top ; or if time is allowed 

 for saturation, the trouble of preliminary soaking may be 

 saved by simply pouring all the batter thus. This, when 

 gently baked, supplies a delicious and highly nutritious dish. 

 We call it cheese pudding at home, but my own experience 

 convinces me that we make a mistake in using it to sup- 

 plement the joint. It is far too nutritious for this ; its 

 savoury character tempts one to eat it so freely that it 

 would be far wiser to use it as the Swiss peasant uses his 



fondevin, i.e. as the one and only dish of a good wholesome 

 dinner. 



I have tested its digestibility by eating it heartily for 

 supper. No nightmare has followed. If I sup on a cor- 

 responding quantity of raw cheese my sleep is miserably 

 eventful. 



THE SENSES IN INFANTS. 



IT is related of a deaf and dumb mother that one night, 

 some few days after the birth of her first child, she 

 was seen by the nurse who tended her to rise from her 

 couch, glide stealthily up to the hearth, take from 

 it a ponderous lump of coal, and, with it poised 

 aloft in her hands, to approach the cradle of her 

 sleeping infant. Then, before the horror-stricken nurse 

 could in any way interfere, she dashed the heavy 

 fragment with all conceivable violence to the ground. 

 Naturally the child woke startled out of its slumbers, 

 opened its eyes, agitated its limbs, and began screaming 

 lustily. Whereupon the mother manifested the most un- 

 mistakable signs of joy, thus revealing to the astonished 

 nurse that this strange conduct had not been dictated by 

 any homicidal tendency, but had simply sprung from the 

 deliberate and maternal desire to ascertain if her child 

 participated in its mother's misfortune. 



Now, we only repeat this story in order to make one 

 little comment on it. 



Had it been possible for the mother to try her ingenious 

 experiment at an earlier period of her child's life — say some 

 three hours after birth — she would have suflTered a grievous 

 disappointment The child would not have been aroused 

 by the sound of the falling coal for the simple reason that 

 it would not have heard it. The fact is, children are born 

 perfectly deaf, and remain so for a space varying from six 

 hours to two and even three days. That this should be so 

 cannot be wondered at, when we remember that the human 

 being comes into the world with an immatured nervous 

 system, so that for some time after birth, certain of the 

 sense organs are not ready to enter upon their normal 

 activities. It follows as a necessary corollary from this, 

 that the consciousness of the infant of a few days is some- 

 thing very different from that of a child of three or four 

 years old. The infant's organic sensibility — all those sen- 

 sations connected with the body's performance of its organic 

 functions — is, with certain exceptions, pretty much in the 

 beginning what it will be all through life. The sensation 

 of hunger, for instance, is felt shortly after birth ; and 

 undoubtedly the pains of deranged digestion, resulting in 

 infantile colics, are at a very early period a strongly marked 

 and highly unpleasant experience for the infant. Again, 

 susceptibility to temperature is a well manifested pheno- 

 menon. The intensity of the painful sensation of cold is 

 attested by the cries, both of infants and other young 

 animals whose temperature has been allowed to fall, while 

 the pleasurable sensation induced by warmth is proved, at 

 first negatively by the cessation of cries and all other signs 

 of discomfort, and later on by the presence of those signs 

 characteristic of general well-being. The sensation of 

 warmth, indeed, is so grateful to the child, that it always 

 argues either some constitutional peculiarity on its part, or 

 some bad management on the part of those who have the 

 care of it, if it fails to find pleasure from its immersion in 

 warm water. 



But this by the way. 



So far as the foregoing and other of the organic sensa- 

 tions are concerned, the infant of a week old is very nearly 



