Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/19

Rh are out of bed, by putting meat stews, oatmeal, brown bread, and many kinds of puddings, into the cooker, and simmering all night by the use of a single safe lamp, than in any other way.

People must be taught that the dinner can be put into the oven when both husband and wife go to the mill to work, and so treated that it may be found perfectly cooked at noon, without requiring any attention in the interval.

People must be taught that the best of bread, raised with good yeast, can be mixed and kneaded between 12.30 and 1, placed in a bread-raiser, which will raise it ready for the oven at 6 or 7 , and that this bread may be perfectly baked in two hours by the heat of the evening lamp, which at the same time serves to give light for reading or sewing.

All this can be accomplished with my crude apparatus, but, until some skillful stove-makers take up these inventions and make the ovens in large numbers at low cost, my own efforts must be directed mainly toward ameliorating the condition of the rich, saving the houses of the well-to-do from the heat and smell of the present bad methods, and in this way creating a demand for my ovens which, while made in small numbers by hand-work, are too costly for general use, although in an ordinary family they will pay for themselves in six months.

I have ventured to call the attention of the Public Health Association to these matters, because I have been led, by the study of the statistics of the cost of subsistence, to certain conclusions which are wholly in the line of your work.

I venture to ask you if it is not a fact that bad and wasteful methods of consuming food are not a most potent cost of inability to work to the best advantage? Are they not more promotive of disease, and, in fact, a more subtle cause of want in the midst of abundance, than even the waste on fermented and spirituous liquors?

From my own observations, I am of the opinion that dyspepsia is a cause of more disability than intemperance, although this proposition is not capable of statistical demonstration.

Material life consists in the conversion of forces, or in the application of material products, to the supply of the necessities of life. In the line of absolute necessity food comes first, clothing next, and shelter third. The supply of the materials for meeting these needs of the body is superabundant; comfort and welfare depend upon the relative proportion of the materials used, or upon the direction which may be given to the conversion of these forces. The result of each year's work is a given product; whether that product shall be adequate or otherwise depends almost wholly upon individual intelligence. In respect to the great majority of all who perform the actual manual or mechanical work of