Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/710

692 warms him like whisky and keeps off the rheumatiz." I have again and again felt myself benefited by taking buttermilk—by returning to what was a common practice in the district in which I spent my boyhood. And, certainly, I find it difficult to turn a deaf ear to all that I have heard in praise of the whey-cure in Switzerland and elsewhere by those who have tried it for dyspepsia and rheumatism.

M. I was led to recommend sour buttermilk or sour whey by reflecting on the very facts to which you refer.

C. What about the fattening effects of starch and sugar and other carbo-hydrates? Are these substances convertible into fat?

M. Possibly—nay, probably. At the same time I am disposed to think that in many cases the apparent transformation into fat is to be accounted for by the storing up in the system of the fatty and oily materials of the food—that these materials may remain behind by being, perhaps, less combustible than the lactic acid into which amylaceous and saccharine substances are naturally transformed.

C. You have still a word to say in justification of your preference for your gelatinous galantine.

M. The nitrogenous alimentary substances are divided into proteine compounds and non-proteine compounds. The former (the albuminous group) albumen, fibrine, caseine and their varieties, yield proteine when treated by heat and an alkali; the latter (the gelatinous group) containing gelatine and chondrine—gelatine prepared from bone and structures containing fibrous tissue, chondrine prepared from cartilage—does not yield proteine when so treated. Proteine is looked upon as the base or radical of the albuminous group; but it may only be an occasional chemical product. In any case it does not do to suppose that the non-proteine compounds forming the gelatinous group are useless as articles of food. The proteine and the non-proteine compounds are all reduced to albuminose in the process of digestion, and resolved afterward in the same way into urea and the residual force producing compounds which in all probability is amyloid substance or glycogen. An animal soon dies if it be fed solely on gelatine; and so it does also if it be fed solely on albumen, or fibrine, or starch, or sugar, or oily matter. The different elements of food, animal or vegetable, must be mixed in certain proportions, which are not yet very clearly made out, before an omnivorous animal can thrive upon them. There may be no occasion to take gelatine as food, for gelatine and chondrine are certainly formed in the system from any kind of albuminose; there can not well be any harm in taking it, for, as I have said, it is transformed into albuminose like any other form of nitrogenous substance; and there may be great good in taking it, for the coatings of the cells and fibers of muscle and nerve are made up of a structure like elastic tissue, which yields gelatine in abundance. Indeed, the popular notion that there is something specially strengthening in jelly may not be altogether a fallacy. I can easily believe that