ing to undo this natural
collocation of materials. To please the eye and the palate, we sift out
a less generally nutritive food,--and, to make up for what we have
removed, experience teaches us to have recourse to animal food of
various descriptions.

It is interesting to remark, even in apparently trivial things, how all
nature is full of compensating processes. We give our servants household
bread, while we live on the finest of the wheat ourselves. The mistress
eats that which pleases the eye more, the maid what sustains and
nourishes the body better.

But the whole meal is more wholesome, as well as more nutritive. It is
on account of its superior wholesomeness that those who are experienced
in medicine usually recommend it to our attention. Experience in the
laws of digestion brings us back to the simple admixture found in the
natural seed. It is not an accidental thing that the proportions in
which the ingredients of a truly sustaining food take their places in
the seeds on which we live, should be best fitted at once to promote the
health of the sedentary scholar, and to reinvigorate the strength of the
active man when exhausted by bodily labour.

Some may say that the preceding observations are merely theoretical; and
may demand the support of actual trial, before they will concede that
the selection of the most nourishing and wholesome diet is hereafter to
be regulated by the results of chemical analysis. The demand is
reasonable in itself, and the so-called deductions of theory are
entitled only to the rank of probable conjectures, till they have been
tested by exact and repeated trials.

But such in this case have been made; and our theoretical considerations
come in only to confirm the results of previous experiments--to explain
why these results should have been obtained, and to extend and enforce
the practical lessons which the results themselves appeared to
inculcate.

Thus, from the experiments of Majendie and others, it was known that
animals which in a few weeks died if fed only upon fine flour, lived
long upon whole meal bread. The reason appears from our analytical
investigations. The whole meal contains in large quantity the three
forms of matter by which the several parts of the body are sustained, or
successively renewed. We may feed a man long upon bread and water only,
but unless we wish to kill him also, we must have the apparent cruelty
to restrict him to the coarser kinds of bread. The