days. The middle
of the _loin_ is the next best, and the _rump_ the next. The _round_
will not keep long, unless it is salted. The _brisket_ is the worst, and
will not keep more than three days in summer, and in winter a week.

In regard to the power of the stomach to digest beef, that which is
eaten boiled with salt only, is digested in two hours and forty-five
minutes. Beef, fresh, lean, and rarely-roasted, and a beefsteak broiled,
takes three hours to digest; that fresh, and dry-roasted, and boiled,
eaten with mustard, is digested in three and a half hours. Lean fresh
beef fried, requires four hours, and old hard salted beef boiled, does
not digest in less than four and a quarter hours. Fresh beef-suet boiled
takes five and a half hours.

The usual mode of preserving beef is by salting; and, when intended to
keep for a long time, such as for the use of shipping, it is always
salted with brine; but for family use it should be salted only with good
salt; for brine dispels the juice of meat, and saltpetre only serves to
make the meat dry, and give it a disagreeable and unnatural red color.
Various experiments have been made in curing beef with salt otherwise
than by hand-rubbing, and in a short space of time, and also to preserve
it from putrefaction by other means than salt. Some packers put meat in
a copper which is rendered air-tight, and an air-pump then creates a
vacuum within it, thereby extracting all the air out of the meat; then
brine is pumped in by pressure, which, entering into every pore of the
meat formerly occupied by the air, is said to place it in a state of
preservation in a few minutes. The carcass of an ox was preserved, in
France, for two years from putrefaction by injecting four pounds of
saline mixture into the carotid artery. Whether any such contrivance can
be made available for family purposes, seems doubtful.

Cattle, when slaughtered, are useful to man in various other ways than
by affording food from their flesh,--their offal of tallow, hides, and
horns, forming extensive articles of commerce. Of the _hide_, the
characteristics of a good one for strong purposes are strength in its
middle, or _butt_, as it called, and lightness in the edges, or _offal_.
A bad hide is the opposite of this--thick in the edges and thin in the
middle. A good hide has a firm texture; a bad one, loose and soft. A
hide improves as the summer advances, and it continues to improve after
the new coat of hair in autu