n out of the small chest with
which each man provides himself, and put into a wooden bowl, which
also is the ploughman's property; and on a hollow being made in the
meal, and sprinkled with salt, the boiling water is poured over the
meal, and the mixture receiving a little stirring with a horn spoon,
and the allowance of milk poured over it, the brose is ready to be
eaten; and as every man makes his own brose, and knows his own
appetite, he makes just as much brose as he can consume. The bowl is
scraped clean with the spoon, and the spoon licked clean with the
tongue, and the dish is then placed in the meal-chest for a similar
purpose on the succeeding occasion. The fare is simple, and is as
simply made; but it must be wholesome, and capable of supplying the
loss of substance occasioned by hard labour; for _I believe that no
class of men can endure more bodily fatigue, for ten hours every day,
than those ploughmen of Scotland who subsist on this brose thrice
a-day_."--(Vol. ii. p. 384.)

The quantity of oatmeal allowed to the ploughman--_as his sole food_--is
two pecks, or 17-1/2 lbs. in a week, exactly 2-1/2 lbs. a-day--or 3/4 lb.
for each meal--and yet it often happens that a hard-worked ploughman
cannot consume the whole of this allowance. Speaking again of oatmeal
_porridge_, Mr Stephens says, "there are few more wholesome meals than
oatmeal porridge, or upon which a harder day's work can be wrought.
Children of all ranks in Scotland are brought up on this diet, verifying
the line of Burns,

"'The halesome parritch, chief of Scotia's food.'"

As southern prejudices have a tendency to make their way northward, and,
in the face of old experience at home, are leading many to undervalue the
oatmeal, on which we trust our peasantry will long rely as their staple
food, it is interesting to find that, on this point, science has at length
come to the aid of reason and experience. Chemistry has already told us
many remarkable things in regard to the vegetable food we eat--that it
contains, for example, a certain per centage of the actual fat and lean we
consume in our beef, or mutton, or pork--and, therefore, that he who lives
upon vegetable food may be as strong as the man who lives upon animal
food, because both in reality feed upon the same things in a somewhat
different form. Now it appears, from analysis, that wheaten flour contains
on an ave