Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/277

Rh food material with various acids for the same purpose, and make the same claim in reference to this.

When by these or other means we convert vegetable tissue into dextrine and sugar, as it is naturally converted in the ripening of a pear, and as it has been artificially converted in our laboratories, we shall extend our food-supplies in an incalculable degree. Swedes, turnips, mangel-wurzels, etc., will become delicate diet for invalids, horse-beans better than beef; delicate biscuits and fancy pastry, as well as ordinary bread, will be produced from sawdust and wood-shavings, plus a little leguminous flour.

This may be done now. Long ago I converted an old pocket-handkerchief and part of an old shirt into sugar. Other chemists have done the like in their laboratories. It has yet to be done in the kitchen.

I should add that the sugar referred to in all the above is not cane-sugar, but the sugar corresponding to that in the grape and in honey. It is less sweet than cane or beet sugar, and a better food.

I now conclude this series, with the expression of my firm conviction that the application of chemical science to cookery is capable of vastly extending and improving our food-supplies, and thereby of greatly increasing the numbers of prosperous human beings capable of living on the earth. This, however, demands a great deal of further experimental research.

I have done so little of this in proportion to my suggestions for further research that I fear my readers will liken these papers to those others found by Prince Hal in the pockets of Jack Falstaff: "Oh, monstrous! but one half-pennyworth of experimental bread to this intolerable deal of speculative sack!"



N the 11th of November last there died a man who is entitled by every consideration to a distinguished place in the pages of a scientific journal. For, whatever Alfred Brehm may have lacked in the systematic formalism of technical zoölogists, it can not be denied that he was really great and even unique in the sympathetic comprehension of animals as living beings. Other works similar to the "Thierleben" ("Animal-Life") exist, and have great merit, but in this sympathetic aspect they are far behind this ten-volumed work. It in no way detracts from his merit that he had to call in specialists to assist him in describing the insects and the lower animals; for these departments are a world in themselves, requiring a whole lifetime for their study,