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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. L. No. 1283 



work under well-ordered and kindly direction. 

 He also provided a soup kitchen wliieli could 

 feed a thousand or more people, and he prided 

 himself that it cost only half a franc to pay 

 for the fuel to cook for a thousand persons. 

 He endeavored' to introduce the use of maize 

 meal into Bavaria and gave exact directions 

 as to its cooking. He employed soldiers, who 

 had acquired habits of indolence, upon public 

 works. He arranged little gardens for the 

 military, in which they cultivated potatoes, and 

 through his improvements in the processes of 

 cooking, by means of better boilers which con- 

 sumed less fuel, he endeavored to make the 

 soldiers much more comfortable than they had 

 ever been before and at. much less cost. He 

 sought to improve the live stock of the country 

 by proper breeding. He believed that science 

 was at the foundation of all reformatory en- 

 terprise and in his own words sought "the 

 providing of the wants of the poor and secur- 

 ing their happiness and comfort by the intro- 

 duction of order and industry among them." 

 And his results were successful because his 

 theories were sound. 



One can trace the life of this Bavarian com- 

 munity yet further, for in 1822 Liebig resided 

 in Paris and met there the pupils of the great 

 French scientist, the immortal Lavoisier. 

 Liebig took back with him the fundamental 

 truths discovered by this great Frenchman 

 and later the town of Munich built the first 

 great chemical laboratory, a laboratory des- 

 tined to become the one in which his successor 

 enriched the world by the discovery of arti- 

 ficial alizarine. 



Lavoisier was the iirst to establish the mod- 

 em truths concerning the nutrition of man 

 and stated " La vie est une fonction chimique." 

 He called attention to the fact that his ex- 

 periments showed that the poor laboring man 

 needed more food than the rich man who did 

 no work, and yet that the laborer was much 

 the less likely of the two to get sufficient food. 



The provision of man with adequate food is 

 a social obligation of the highest importance. 

 In the middle of the eighteenth century Ben- 

 jamin Franklin noted that where there was 

 famine there was disorder, and that where 



there was disorder famine followed in its 

 train. This, indeed, we now believe to be the 

 sum and substance of the recent Eussian revo- 

 lution. After the Napoleonic wars famine 

 devastated portions of Europe. In Magendie's 

 " Journal de physiologic "^ there is an account 

 of famine which occurred in six provinces of 

 France during the winter of 1817, the second 

 following the Congress of Vienna, a time of 

 great distress in Europe. A dropsy of a pecu- 

 liar kind developed. Curiously enough, just 

 one hundred years later, in January, 1917, a 

 malady called " war edema," broke out in Ger- 

 many and Austria, especially among prisoners 

 of war. The cause of the disease was at- 

 tributed to lack of nourishment, especially to 

 lack of fat in the diet, for after giving 100 

 grams of fat daily for a week to each of three 

 different patients a complete cure was effected 

 without resort to any other remedy. 



A national laboratory of human nutrition 

 would have many unsolved questions to an- 

 swer and perhaps a few of these questions 

 might be suggested in this article. 



There should be researches into the require- 

 ments of food necessary to maintain health, 

 strength and work in men, women and chil- 

 dren engaged in various occupations. It is 

 well known that a man who is over the aver- 

 age weight is an inefScient laborer, but it is 

 not certain whether a man who is reduced in 

 weight and receives good food is as efficient as 

 when he is of average weight. He might 

 easily be just as effective and possibly more 

 effective a worker when thin than when of 

 average weight. 



Another important question is whether the 

 ration of about 500 grams of meat per day 

 which has existed for over a hundred years in 

 the American and English armies is not alto- 

 gether too high for production of the maxi- 

 mum of physical work which can be accom- 

 plished by a soldier. It may well be that such 

 a diet of meat may tend to mental relaxation 

 and to a sensation of difficulty in the perform- 

 ance of a task, such as has been actually ob- 



2 Gaspard, B., "EfEets des alimeng v^gfitaux her- 

 bac6s, " Journal de physiologie, 1821, I., 237. 



