Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/320

306 gases which must be separated from the life-sustaining principle by the action of our respiratory organs—not by any inorganic process. We can not breathe pure oxygen. For analogous reasons bran-flour makes better bread than bolted flour; meat and saccharine fruits are healthier than meat-extracts and pure glucose. In short, artificial extracts and compounds are, on the whole, less wholesome than the palatable products of Nature. In the case of bran-flour and certain fruits with a large percentage of wholly innutritious matter, chemistry fails to account for this fact, but biology suggests the mediate cause: the normal type of our physical constitution dates from a period when the digestive organs of our (frugivorous) ancestors adapted themselves to such food—a period compared with whose duration the age of gristmills and made dishes is but of yesterday.

We can not doubt that the highest degree of health could only be attained by strict conformity to Haller's rule, i. e., by subsisting exclusively on the pure and unchanged products of Nature. In the tropics such a mode of life would not imply anything like asceticism: a meal of milk and three or four kinds of sweet nuts, fresh dates, bananas, and grapes would not clash with the still higher rule, that eating, like every other natural function, should be a pleasure and not a penance. Heat destroys the delicate flavor of many fruits and makes others less digestible by coagulating their albumen. But in the frigid latitudes, where we have to dry and garner many vegetable products in order to survive the unproductive season, the process of cooking our food has advantages which fully outweigh such objections. Few men with post-diluvian teeth would agree with Dr. Schlemmer that hard grain is preferable to bread. No Bostoner would renounce his favorite dish for a nosebag full of dry beans. Dried prunes, too, are improved by cooking—in taste, at least, and perhaps in digestibility. Besides, we should not forget that the natural taste of such substances, before they became over-dry, was agreeable, or at least not repulsive to our palates. It appears that on week-days the children of Israel indulged their poor in the practice of snatching free luncheons from a convenient corn-field (Matthew xii, I), and the Imam of Muscat still feeds his soldiers on crude wheat and dhourra-corn, a sort of millet, which many French soldiers learned to eat raw, as their Mameluke captors declined to cook it for them. Even the legumes—peas, beans, and lentils—pass through a period when they are soft and full of sweet milk-juice, though in their sun-dried over-ripeness they become as tough as wood. In the scale of wholesomeness the place next to Haller's man-food par excellence should therefore be assigned to vegetable substances whose pleasant taste has been restored by the process of cooking. With this. addition, even an invalid, dieting for his health, need not complain of lack of variety, for the number of nutritious vegetables that can be successfully cultivated as far north as Hamburg and Boston is almost infinite if we include the plants of the corresponding Asiatic latitudes