Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/659

Rh  of the peas, some soluble casein, and has a fine flavor, the very essence of the peas. If to this, as it comes from the saucepan, be added a little stock, or some Liebig's extract, a delicious soup is at once produced, requiring nothing more than ordinary seasoning. With care, it may form a clear soup such as just now is in fashion among the fastidious; but, prepared however roughly, it is a very economical, wholesome, and appetizing soup, and costs a minimum of trouble.

I must here add a few words in advocacy of the further adoption in this country of the French practice of using, as potage, the water in which vegetables generally (excepting potatoes) have been boiled. When we boil cabbages, turnips, carrots, etc., we dissolve out of them a very large proportion of their saline constituents—salts which are absolutely necessary for the maintenance of health; salts, without which we become victims of gout, rheumatism, lumbago, neuralgia, gravel, and all the ills that human flesh, with a lithic-acid diathesis, is heir to, i. e., about the most painful series of all its inheritances. The potash of these salts existing therein, in combination with organic acids, is separated from these acids by organic combustion, and is then and there presented to the baneful lithic acid of the blood and tissues, the stony torture-particles of which it converts into soluble lithate of potash, and thus enables them to be carried out of the system.

I know not which of the fathers of the Church invented fast-days and soup maigre, but could almost suppose that he was a scientific monk, a profound alchemist, like Basil Valentine, who, in his seekings for the aurum potabile, the elixir of life, had learned the beneficent action of organic potash salts on the blood, and therefore used the authority of the Church to enforce their frequent use among the faithful.—Knowledge.



HIS article is not intended for school-boys desiring to enjoy their cigarettes out of the sight of their tutor, nor for children who try to play the man by taking up one of his faults. It is addressed to smokers, but does not purpose to increase the number of them. Its design is to indicate what precautions may be taken to diminish as far as possible the inconveniences of smokers' glandular irritation; but it affirms the reality of these inconveniences, and declares it impossible to remove them completely.

The first hygienic principle relative to tobacco is, then, Do not smoke at all; don't smoke at any age. More than one old smoker will agree 