THE FOOD WE GIVE. 
593 
diploma ; the latter plan has been wisely chosen. The council 
has no desire to interfere with the prerogative of the schools, 
or to dictate the method of instruction; but it has a desire to 
avoid conflicting legislation, which at a former period pro¬ 
duced untoward results, from the evil influence of which the 
profession has not yet recovered. 
Extracts from British and Foreign Journals. 
THE FOOD WE GIVE. 
By CuTHBERT W. Johnson, F.R.S. 
Great is our encouragement to again and again renew 
the inquiries relating to the food of our live stock. The 
steady advances which have been made during the last 
three centuries in this branch of agriculture may well prompt 
us to aim at still higher standards of excellence. If the 
stockowner of our time only thinks for a moment of the 
farmers' domestic animals as they were in the days of Harry 
the Eighth, the coarse, raw-boned cattle, the wild, long- 
wooled sheep, which then existed on our hill-sides in summer, 
and starved on straw in winter—the necessity which then 
existed for killing the bullocks at Martinmas, because the 
turnip was not then known as a field crop—when South- 
downs and Shorthorns were not even dreamt of—when, we 
say, the modern agriculturist remembers these things, he 
may well be encouraged to persevere in his efforts to obtain 
still more valuable results. And, moreover, he will not fail 
to remind himself that during the present generation these 
advances in our knowledge of the properties of food have 
been made at an accelerated pace; and he may also usefully 
remember that for this increase of our knowledge we have 
during the last quarter of a century been very materially 
aided by the researches upon the food of animals of such 
men as Justus Liebig, Lvon Playfair, and J. B. Lawes. 
It was in one of his early papers that Professor Playfair, 
after explaining how the excess of blood in an animal is con¬ 
verted into flesh (muscular tissue and cellular tissue), pro¬ 
ceeded to remark; Fat is not a substance peculiar to the 
animal economy. We find the fat of beef and mutton in 
cocoa-beans, of human fat in olive-oil, of butter in palin-od 
