116 STORRS AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 
EXPERIMENTS ON THE DIGESTIBILITY OF 
FISH AND POULTRY. 
BY Ri. Ds MILNER: 

The present article is a report of digestion experiments with 
poultry and fish which form part of the nutrition investigations 
carried on by the Station during the year 1904 in cooperation 
with the United States Department of Agriculture. 
The object of these experiments was to obtain information 
regarding the actual nutritive value of poultry and fish. It 
has been explained in previous reports of this Station that 
for the proper estimation of the nutritive value of any food 
material, it is not sufficient to consider merely its percentage 
composition, that is, the amount of the different nutritive in- 
gredients it contains. It is necessary to consider also its 
digestibility, or the amount of each ingredient that will be 
digested and absorbed, and so made of use to the body for the 
purposes of nutrition—the building of tissue, and the yielding 
of energy. Thus, two foods might be very much alike in 
chemical composition and yet, because of differences in digesti- 
bility, differ widely in actual nutritive value. This is known 
to be the case with graham and white flours. If these two 
grades of flour are milled from the same lot of wheat, their 
composition is found to be much the same, there: being a little 
more protein in the graham than in the white flour. Bread 
niade from the white flour, however, is much more completely 
digested than that from the graham flour. Asa result the 
body actually obtains more nourishment from a given quantity 
of white flour than from the same quantity of graham flour. 
Considerable information is now available concerning the 
digestibility of mixed diets in. general, and of several different 
classes of food materials. As suggested just above, study has 
already been made of the digestibility and relative nutritive 
value of different gtades of wheat flour. Experiments with 
