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[June, 
Analyses oj Books. 
diately below and adhering to the third or inner coat of the true 
bran, whilst the interior of the grain is made up exclusively of 
starch-granules. 
This belief lies at the root of the so-called “ bread-reform ” 
movement, and hence, as Dr. Randolph puts it, “ many most 
intelligent persons habitually rasp their digestive surfaces with 
branny food.” The question is one of importance to the entire 
wheat-consuming portion of the human race, and the author has 
therefore done good service to the world by demonstrating the 
presence of gluten in notable quantity in the interior of the 
grain. 
The fifth essay supplies evidence that Millon’s reagent is use- 
less as an isolated test, seeing that it readts with two such 
distindt compounds as peptone and the bile-salts. 
In the seventh paper Dr. Randolph shows that milk is more 
easily digestible when raw than after boiling ; in the latter state 
it is less sensitive to rennet, but much more to acids, whether 
strong or dilute. 
In the next memoir — a study of the nutritive value of branny 
foods — Dr. Randolph, after a prolonged course of experiments 
and observations, concludes that the carbohydrates of bran are 
digested by man to a slight degree only ; that the nutritive salts 
of wheat are contained chiefly in the bran, and therefore, when 
bread is eaten to the exclusion of other foods, the kinds of bread 
which contain these elements are the more valuable. But when, 
as is usually the case, bread is used along with other foods which 
contain the inorganic nutritive elements, a white bread offers, 
weight for weight, more available food than does one containing 
bran. By far the major portion of the gluten of wheat exists in 
the central four-fifths of the grain, entirely independent of the 
cells of the fourth bran-layer (the so-called gluten-cells). Further, 
these last-named cells, even when thoroughly cooked, are little — 
if at all — affedted by passage through the digestive tracft of the 
healthy adult. In an ordinary mixed diet the retention of bran 
in flour is a false economy, as its presence so quickens peristaltic 
adtion as to prevent the complete digestion and absorption not 
only of the proteids contained in the branny food, but of other 
food-matters ingested at the same time. Still, as in the bran of 
wheat as ordinarily roughly removed, there is adherent a notable 
quantity of the true gluten of the endosperm, any process which 
in the produdtion of wheaten flour should remove merely the 
three protedtive cortical layers of the grain would yield a flour at 
once cheaper and more nutritious than that ordinarily used. 
These results, it must be admitted, are of great pradtical moment, 
and seem to us to cut away the ground from under the feet of 
the bread-reformers. 
The tenth memoir relates to a subjedt which has only recently 
arrived at pradtical importance. Most of our readers will be 
aware that the mineral fats, or more corredtly hydrocarbons, have 
