,
more easily digested than an equal weight of old beef. The fact is, that
digestibility and flavor are only of great importance to dyspeptic
persons. In the healthy digestive organs a pound weight of (dry) food
of inferior flavor and slow digestibility will be just as useful as the
same weight of well-flavored and easily assimilable aliment, provided
all other conditions be alike. If the food be eaten with a relish, and
tolerated by the stomach, its digestibility will not, except in extreme
cases, affect in a very sensible degree its nutritiveness.

Were one question in animal nutrition satisfactorily answered, it
would then be comparatively easy to arrange aliments in the order of
their nutritive value. That question is--What are the proper relative
proportions of the fat-forming and flesh-forming constituents of our
food? It is constantly urged, that the food of the Irish peasantry
contains an excess of the fat-forming materials in relation to the
muscle-forming substances; and the remedy suggested is, that their
staple article of food--potatoes--should be supplemented with flesh,
peas, and such like substances, in which, it is supposed, the elements
of nutrition are more fairly balanced. In potatoes, the proportion of
fat-formers (calculated as fat) is about five times as much as that
of the flesh-formers; but these principles exist in the same relative
proportions in the fat bacon with which the potato-eater loves
to supplement his bulky food. In bread we find the proportion of
fat-formers to be only 2-1/2 times as much as that of the flesh-formers,
whilst, according to Lawes and Gilbert, the edible portion of the
carcass of a fat sheep contains 6-1/2 times as much fat as nitrogenous
(flesh-forming) compounds. It is evident, then, that meat such as, for
example, the beef recently imported from Monte Video, from which the
fatty elements of nutrition are almost completely absent, cannot be
a suitable adjunct to a farinaceous food.

There is evidence to prove that in the animal food consumed by the
population of these countries, the proportion of fatty to nitrogenous
matters is greater than in the seeds of cereal and leguminous plants,
and but little less than in potatoes. "It would appear to be
unquestionable," say Lawes and Gilbert, "therefore, that the influence
of our staple _animal foods_, to supplement our otherwise mainly
farinaceous diet, is, on the large scale, to _reduce_, and _not to
increase_, the relati