ent, that that food must be the most nourishing
which supplies all these ingredients of the body most abundantly on the
whole, or in proportions most suited to the actual wants of the
individual animal to which it is given.

How stands the question, then, in regard to this point between the brown
bread and the white--the fine flour, and the whole meal of wheat?

The grain of wheat consists of two parts, with which the miller is
familiar--the inner grain and the skin that covers it. The inner grain
gives the pure wheat flour; the skin, when separated, forms the bran.
The miller cannot entirely peel off the skin from his grain, and thus
some of it is unavoidably ground up with his flour. By sifting, he
separates it more or less completely: his seconds, middlings, &c., owing
their colour to the proportion of brown bran that has passed through the
sieve along with the flour. The whole meal, as it is called, of which
the so-named brown _household bread_ is made, consists of the entire
grain ground up together--used as it comes from the mill-stones
unsifted, and therefore containing all the bran.

The first white flour, therefore, may be said to contain no bran, while
the whole meal contains all that grew naturally upon the grain.

What is the composition of these two portions of the seed? How much do
they respectively contain of the several constituents of the animal
body? How much of each is contained also in the whole grain?

1. _The fat._ Of this ingredient a thousand pounds of the

Whole grain contain 28 lbs.
Fine Flour, " 20 "
Bran, " 60 "

So that the bran is much richer in fat than the interior part of the
grain, and the whole grain ground together (whole meal) richer than the
finer part of the flour in the proportion of nearly one half.

2. _The muscular matter._ I have had no opportunity as yet of
ascertaining the relative proportions of this ingredient in the bran and
fine flour of the same sample of grain. Numerous experiments, however,
have been made in my laboratory, to determine these proportions in the
fine flour and whole seed of several varieties of grain. The general
result of these is, that the whole grain uniformly contains a larger
quantity, weight for weight, than the fine flour extracted from it does.
The particular results in the case of wheat and Indian corn were as
follows:--A thousand pounds of the whole grain and of the fine flour
contained of muscular matt