Belonging also to this question of waste and nourishment, it is to be noted, that the almost everywhere-agreed-upon notion that soup, which sets into strong jelly, must be the most nutritious, is altogether a mistake. The soup sets because it contains the gelatine or glue of the sinews, flesh, and bones: but on this imagined richness alone it has, by recent experiments, been proved that no animal can live. The jelly of bones boiled into soup, can furnish only jelly for our bones; the jelly of sinew or calf's feet can form only sinew; neither flesh nor its juices set into a jelly. It is only by long boiling we obtain a soup that sets, but in a much less time we get all the nourishing properties that meat yields in soup.* Jellies are no doubt useful in cases of

* In conformity with the above, Leibig tells how the best beef tea or brown soup should be made. "When one pound of lean beef, free from fat, and separated from the bones, in the finely chopped state in which it is used for beef sausages or mince-meat, is uniformly mixed with its own weight of cold water, then slowly heated to boiling, and the liquid after boiling briskly for a minute or two is strained through a cloth or sieve from the coagulated albumen and the recovery from illness when the portions of the system in which it occurs have been wasted, but in other cases, though easily enough digested, jelly is unwholesome, for it loads the blood with not only useless but disturbing products. Nor does jelly stand alone. Neither can we live on meat which has been cleared of fat, long boiled, and has had all the juice pressed out of it; a dog so fed, lost in forty-three days a fourth of his weight; in fifty-five days he bore all the appearance of starvation, and yet such meat has all the muscular fibre in it.

In the same way, animals fed on pure caseine, albumen, fibrin of vegetables, starch, sugar, or fat, died, with every appearance of death by hunger.

Further experiment showed that these worse than useless foods were entirely without certain matters which are always to be found in the blood, namely, phosphoric acid, potash, soda, lime, [magnesia, oxide of iron,* and common salt (in certain of these we may mention, by way of parenthesis, that veal is especially deficient, and hence its difficulty of digestion and poor nutrient properties). These salts of the blood, as they are termed in chemistry, are to be found in the several wheys and juices of meat, milk, pulse, and grain. Here then was the proof complete, that such food, to support life, must contain the several ingredients of the blood, and that the stomach cannot make, nor the body do without the least of them.

We are indebted for the information given in this chapter to the Familiar Letters, and Animal Chemistry of Baron fibrin, which are then become hard and horny, we obtain an equal weight of the most aromatic soup, of such strength as can be had even by boiling for hours from a piece of flesh; also, when mixed with salt, and the other additions by which soup is usually seasoned, and tinged somewhat darker by means of roasted onions or burnt sugar, it forms the very best soup that can be prepared from a pound of flesh."

The proof of the excellence of this soup is to be had in the fact, that it has been found of the greatest value to an army on active service. Given to wounded soldiers with a little wine it immediately restores their strength from the exhaustion by loss of blood, and enables them far better to bear removal to the nearest hospital. There is scarce need to mention that the soup so useful in such severe instances must be a most admirable restorative in cases of weakness from illness, etc. True it is that this soup contains little or no flesh or albumen; but it is rich in the juice of flesh. Flesh itself, as we have shown in the case of starvation, wastes but slowly, the iron and several salts of the juices are far more rapidly lost, and also more quickly digested or furnished to the blood, and thence the speedily reviving effects of this quickly made beef-tea.

* "We cannot imagine the formation of blood globules without iron, corresponding to the quantity which daily becomes worn out or inactive, and is excreted by the intestinal canal. It is quite certain that, if iron be excluded from the food, organic life cannot be supported. Vegetable food, especially grain, and, of course, bread, contains as much iron as beef or red meat generally; veal contains only one third of the iron that beef does. Cheese, eggs, and especially fish, contain in proportion to the alkalies, a quantity still smaller than veal."

Leibig, works full of instruction, and to which we would refer such of our readers as may have found their attention fixed by our remarks. Few books will better repay a study, and there are few subjects of more true interest than the explanation of how the earth, and air, and rains, and dew feed vegetation; how vegetables become the flesh of beasts, their flesh the flesh of men; and how, through every order of life, there is growth, waste, maintenance of force, and hourly return of borrowed elements, until at length the life is ended, and the frame, obedient to the perpetual force of nature, yields back the several elements that gathered, in the daily food, built up the bulk, restored to every part its hourly waste, supplied the strength for every effort, and gave at every breath the vital warmth.