istry of Foods,’ 
STANDARDS FOR RATIONS AND DIETARIES. 205 
STANDARDS FOR RATIONS AND DIETARIES. 
BYAW VO. ALWA LER, 
e+e 

Some twenty years ago, at the Woodstock meeting of the 
Connecticut State Board of Agriculture in December, 1874, it 
was the writer’s privilege to read a paper on the “ Results of 
Late European Experiments on the Feeding of Cattle.” A year 
before, the same subject was presented, though in less detail, at 
a meeting of the Maine State Board of Agriculture. These were, 
so far as I am aware, the first attempts in the English language 
to explain the theory of cattle-feeding which had become current 
in Germany, and to set forth the standards for rations already 
more or less in vogue in that country. Ina paper on ‘The Chem- 
’ read at the meeting of the Connecticut Board of 
Agriculture in December, 1884, a brief statement was made of 
the main results of inquiry up to that time regarding the food 
and nutrition of man, with especial reference to the chemical 
composition of food materials and the quantities appropriated 
for the nutrition of people of different classes under different 
circumstances. Although the standards for daily dietaries there 
set forth had appeared in print in English before, I am not aware 
that they had been explained as fully as was done even in the 
short, popular paper just referred to. 
The purpose of citing these incidents is to call attention to the 
short period during which the standards for rations for domestic 
animals and for dietaries for man, now so widely current in the 
‘United States, have been before the English reading public. 
The rapidity with which they have come into notice, their very 
general adoption in this country by writers upon the subject, by 
teachers, and by experimenters, and the extent to which they 
have become a part of the familiar knowledge of intelligent, 
practical men and women is, it seems to me, not only an inter- 
esting phenomenon, but an auspicious omen also, for the progress 
of the higher knowledge, as applied to the arts and industries of 
life in the United States. 
