Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/701

Rh be of the best quality, prepared in the best manner, and at the same time furnish the known scientific requirements of proper nutrition. To this end an analysis was made of every article of food proposed, and a careful record kept of the number of pounds purchased, its price, and chemical value in proteids, or the nitrogen and tissue furnishing properties; the fats needed for fatty tissues and fuel; and the carbohydrates serving principally as fuel, but all three furnishing energy in the form of heat and capacity for work estimated carefully as so many calories.

Every day's menu was planned with direct reference to supplying the chemical requirements in their proper proportions, at the same time meeting the other stated requirements.

The results have been most satisfactory in that the family were well fed, and that nearly all gained in weight and in general physical condition while expressing great interest and approval of the experiment. Financially the experiment was also most satisfactory, showing how the price fixed for board, three dollars and a half, is proportioned among the different items entering into its cost. The tables prepared during the long and careful scientific investigation concerning this dietary are also a most valuable contribution as a basis for further experiment, both public and private.

The most of this work has been and is now continuing under the direction of Dean Marion Talbot.

The other dean of the woman's department of Chicago University, Alice Freeman Palmer, a graduate of Michigan University, and later the honored president of Wellesley College, afterward, as one of its trustees, was chiefly instrumental in having the new science introduced there. Later she has been lending her strength to this subject as a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education; as president of the Woman's Education Association of Boston, which last year had an important exhibit of domestic art and science, and which now has a strong committee on domestic science; as a member of the committee on domestic service investigation of the Boston branch of the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ; in introducing something of this work into the vacation schools in Cambridge. She is also identified with the movement in Boston to introduce domestic science into public and private schools and colleges, and which last fall established a school of domestic service to attack the problem in another way. That band of twelve college women who organized the Sanitary Science Club in November, 1883, builded better than they knew.

While some of our college women have given so much thought and effort to secure nutritious and attractive diet for those under their charge, who in turn will go out and preach this new gospel of