put asunder. Among the "common
things" which educators should teach the rising generation, this ought
certainly not to be overlooked. It is the commonest and yet most
neglected of the branches of female education.

The greater part of human labour is occupied in the direct production of
the materials for human food. The farming classes and their labourers
devote themselves to the planting, rearing, and reaping of oats and
other cereals; and the grazing farmer to the production of cattle and
sheep, for the maintenance of the population at large. All these
articles--corn, beef, mutton, and such-like--are handed over to the
female half of the human species to be converted into food, for the
sustenance of themselves, their husbands, and their families. How do
they use their power? Can they cook? Have they been taught to cook? Is
it not a fact that, in this country, cooking is one of the lost or
undiscovered arts?

Thousands of artizans and labourers are deprived of half the actual
nutriment of their food, and continue half-starved, because their wives
are utterly ignorant of the art of cooking. They are yet in entire
darkness as to the economizing of food, and the means of rendering it
palatable and digestible.

Even the middle classes are badly served in this respect. "If we could
see," says a public writer, "by the help of an Asmodeus, what is going
on at the dinner hour of the humbler of the middle class,--what a
spectacle of discomfort, waste, ill-temper, and consequent ill-conduct
it would be! The man quarrels with his wife because there is nothing he
can eat, and he generally makes up in drink for the deficiencies in the
article of food. There is thus not only the direct waste of food and
detriment to health, but the further consequent waste of the use of
spirits, with its injury to the habits and the health."

On the other hand, people who eat well, drink moderately; the
satisfaction of the appetite dispensing with the necessity for resorting
to stimulants. Good humour too, and good health, follow a good meal; and
by a good meal we mean anything, however simple, well dressed in its
way. A rich man may live very expensively and very ill; and a poor man
may live frugally and very well, if it be his good fortune to have a
good cook in his wife or in his servant.

The most worthless unit in a family is an ill-managing wife, or an
indolent woman of any sort. The fair sex are sometimes very acute in
what concerns the