Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/587

 580 grasses yet to be found, these experiments would lead us to conclude that innumerable varieties of wheat may yet be brought forth by careful culture, as there is reason to believe that nearly all the existing varieties have been cultivated from the Ægilops ovata. These facts should stimulate our agriculturists to further investigation in this direction. The cases at hand contain specimens of the different methods of making bread. A loaf of the ordinary fermented bread, made two years’years [sic] ago, represents one mass of green fungi, whilst other bread, made without fermentation, and still older, is quite free from these growths. The director of the department should obtain some specimens of bread made by Dr. Daugleish’s process, which presents, perhaps, the purest form of the staff of life yet known.

In other cases we find bread made by savage tribes. The Dika bread from Africa looks and cuts like Castile soap; it is full of vegetable on, and would form a famous bread for cold localities. Then there is the New Zealand native bread, resembling lumps of yellow ochre, being, in fact, the pollen of a common reed.

The most curious article, in the shape of bread, is a very ancient specimen, which, together with dried applies and the stones of various fruits, was found in the Lake of Zurich. It is known these remains are coeval with what is termed the Stone Period, or that far distant age before the natives discovered the use of iron. It would seem an impossibility that so perishable a material as bread could have survived for so many thousands of years as it has done; but analysis proves that it is true bread, and there can be no doubt that it is rightly ascribed to the remote period in history given to it. There can be little doubt that the like remains of the aboriginal inhabitants of this country are yet to be found in our own lakes.

Whilst we are upon the mere curiosities of food, let us direct the attention of the visitor to the specimens of edible snails. He will smile, when we inform him that it is an undoubted fact, that the consumption of them is so great at the present time in Paris, as to interfere greatly with the sale of oysters.

The most singular articles of food are to be found among the cases dedicated to the Chinese and Japanese. Here we see brains of the sturgeon, birds’ nests, deer sinews; glue from the deer skin, rhinoceros, and elephant hides, and sharks’ fins. The Chinese, it appears, are very fond of a gelatinous kind of food. Their sweetmeats are of a very superior kind, and extremely like our own,—indeed, the little Celestials suck lollypops that may be matched any day at Fortnum and Mason’s. The range of bottles containing these Chinese comfits look so tempting, that we are informed they have been broken open and cleared, more than once, by British youths.

The extent to which seaweeds are made an article of food by different nations would scarcely be believed, were they not ranged here before our eyes.

In looking at some of the specimens in the Museum, we are inclined to ask if it is a natural exposition, or an advertising medium for some Teetotal Society. Here, for instance, is a goblet filled with a verd-green fluid, and one beside it with a dull olive-black mixture. On carefully scanning the labels attached to them, we find they are intended as tests of the presence of alcohol in a person’s breath. Thus, the dull dark green is a solution of bichromate of potash in sulphuric acid. This specimen, after having been breathed through for half an hour by a teetotaler, retains its original colour: whilst that subjected to the breath of an individual who had taken a glass of brandy and water half an hour before, is grass-green in appearance. What is intended to be proved by thus ostentatiously holding up the hues of a glass of liquid we cannot conceive. Who wants to hunt up even the very ghost of alcohol in this absurd manner? It is bad enough to find our old friend Cruikshank adulterating the text of our fairy tales as he has done in his illustrated edition with teetotal nonsense, but to find science stooping to such fanaticism in a public gallery is quite unpardonable. Not far from the drunkard’s breath-test, we find an enormous bottle filled with water. Innocent as this looks, it is intended as a libel upon the spectator. For we read upon its rotund surface the following: “Average quantity, 3 gallons, of alcohol consumed yearly by each person in England in the form of beer, spirits, &c.!” Imagine the good old lady upon my arm—a dear old soul that never touches anything stronger than Bohea—reading this teetotal flam, and wondering, if she really does drink gin-and-water to this extent, who pays her spirit merchant. The absurdity of taking a general average, and then applying it personally to every spectator is patent enough. But the ingenious contriver of these moral lessons has not done with “Stiggins” yet, and, by implication, all that read share the crime of Stiggins. He is attacked through his exhalations and through his fluid ingesta, now forming a more solid argument in castigation of his beastly drunkenness. This is shown to us in a glass case full of grain, with this inscription: “Amount of barley, 1½ bushels, destroyed by producing the yearly average consumption of ardent spirits by each person in England. That amount would feed a full-grown man for forty days.” If, in addition to these cases, Mr. Gough could persuade the directors of the Museum to have one of the attendants placed here, and daily “fuddled” as a “horrid example,” the teaching would be complete. After seeing alcohol in the form of the mildest table ale thus ruthlessly hunted down, it certainly is not reassuring to turn to the cases in which the teas are exposed, and to find they are so adulterated. Here we see before our eyes the Prussian blue, the chromate of lead, the French chalk, the clay, and the hundred and one odd dirts which go to adulterate ordinary tea, and to make up lye tea, in which there is not a particle of the real leaf present. If we turn to the Adam’s ale supplied London, we are still further puzzled to us in what to drink. Dr. Lankester has run up the full gamut, if we may so speak, of the filth found in the Thames from Southend to Thames Ditton. The various shades of nastiness are brought clearly before our eye; but that organ