the short run to Berlin. But the royal gallery of Berlin is as worthy of a visit as the picture gallery in the Zwinger of Dresden.

The great building of the old museum that bounds one side of the Lustgarten is filled with pictures by old masters. No longer can it be said, as V. Tissot wrote in 1875: "Ils auraient tro que une demi-douzaine de Madonnas de Raphael contre un grenadier de six pieds" (They would exchange exchange half a dozen Raphaels for one six-foot grenadier). And the great building which has arisen behind this of the new museum is being filled by pictures from great living masters, whose work is full of intense vigour and action, expressive of the energetic life in modern Germany.

The great names of Kaulback, Becker, Cornelius, Defregger, Ittenbach, Knaus, Knille, Schroeder, some of whose finest works appear in this gallery, prove that if Dresden should be visited for the old masters in the Zwinger, Berlin claims a visit for the masterpieces of artists of to

rous, but to hear vocal music the most delicately rendered the "Singakademie" should be visited.

The true Berliner will spend his money freely for his amusement, but he must have some good music; and truly Berlin abounds with good music,

whether it be rendered by an artisans' vocal union or by the picked company at the Royal Opera House.

For the sister arts of Painting and Sculpture Berlin should also be visited. Of the thousands of tourists who visit Dresden scarcely ten pass on

BY THE GOLD-FISH POND.

day, whose work is more true to nature, more human, and oftentimes more soulful than that of some of the great pictures of the old masters. Battle pieces in this gallery are unfortunately too numerous, but it is a suggestive sight to see squads of young soldiers told off to go the round

A

MASTER of language wrote "The Philosophy of Clothes," and left to smaller minds the consideration of that first necessity of nature-"food." If the importance of a subject be the measure of its necessity, then food stands before clothing. Certain tribes in hot countries like Africa, and in cold like Patagonia, have no clothing to speak of, but where in the whole world is there existence without food? Food is a kind of inward clothing. The frost chills a lean, hungry body, though cased in fur, but a well-lined capon enwrapped in an illlined cloak, shivers not at the breath of winter. The body assimilates and masters food, turning the food into itself. Thus it is that the nature of the food itself has but little influence on the genius, disposition, and affections of the individual. Feeding on the meat of the bear makes no man brutal, of the deer makes no man swift, nor is gentleness and humanity to be produced in children by feeding them on doves. All this is well. Were it otherwise, what responsibility there would be in the nurture of the young! Each person's future career would have to be fixed at an early age, so that appropriate feeding might produce appropriate mental and bodily qualities. A child destined for the army might have to be fed on the blood and brains of ferocious beasts, and a legislator on dishes spiced with pepper and curries, to impart that acrid heat of expression which modern debates seem to require.

Though the essential nature of man-that which is born in him-cannot be changed by food, temporary, irritable, and ill-conditioned mental and bodily states are easily produced by errors in eating and drinking.

The biliousness of despotic monarchs has cost many a slave his head, and the destiny of a nation has been modified by the dyspepsia of its statesmen. If the remote as well as the immediate effects of indigestion be traced out, it will be found to have caused a greater sum of misery than plagues, famines, or earthquakes.

Sage, trite maxims for both the cure and prevention of dyspepsia are plentiful, but good results, whether from legitimate or quack

nostrums, are rare. As there are fine shades of feature distinguishing one man from another, so would it seem that there are minute differences and individual peculiarities in the digestive organs which are not to be modified or corrected by general rules.

Consider what a piece of refined chemical and biological art it is to transform a Christmas dinner of roast beef, plum-pudding, bread and vegetables, into a fairly homogeneous fluid, most of which is capable of entering into minute microscopical channels and of being conveyed to the circulation; how albumin is made soluble and

turned into a form easily transuding through animal membranes; how the fat is emulsified ; how the starch changed into sugar. Consider the transitions, the pulling down, the building. up, the degradations, the new formations-all in a living tube of but twenty-five to thirty feet long. Then wonder that the matter is for the most part done so silently, automatically, and pleasantly.

"Know thyself"-a pithy sentence, originally uttered for the purpose of inculcating on every one the desirability of justly estimating his own mental powers-may be expanded and paraphrased into, "Know thy own digestion, its capabilities and weaknesses." Such a knowledge will spare many a stomach-and, for the matter of that, many a heart-ache. The lean and hungry Cassius who sleeps not at night an thinks too much is a dyspeptic Cassius, and the sleek-headed, easy-going, laughter-loving soul is one who has a good appetite, and satisfies it without discomfort.

Putting on one side gastric diseases and weaknesses which arise from the excessive use of stimulants, one of the most common and unpleasant sensations of dyspeptic people is a feeling of distension in from half an hour to an hour after a meal. This distension is produced by gases.

Fermentation, putrefaction, and digestion are all closely allied, and they are all normally attended with the evolution of various gases. The amount of gas possible to be produced from the ordinary daily diet of an adult man amounts to many cubic feet; but healthy, vigorous digestion never produces any inconvenient quantity. It is otherwise in certain abnormal conditions, in which the food rather putrefies than digests. In extreme and rare cases of this kind gas has been evolved in such quantities as to threaten exist

ence.

The gases to be found in the intestinal canal are irrespirable; they contain no oxygen. The chief of the gases is the choke-damp of the miner, together with marsh gas, nitrogen, and small quantities of sulphuretted hydrogen. These gases, when developed in small quantities, are to a considerable extent absorbed into the blood and exhaled by the lungs. A German observer has lately proved this to be even true of the inflammable gases, such as marsh gas.

The digestion of well-boiled potatoes, of carrots, of bread, of butter, of fish, of meat-takes place with very little development of gas. On the other hand, cabbages, and fibrous vegetable matters generally, necessarily produce marsh and carbonic acid gases. Eggs also give up their sulphur in the shape of sulphuretted hydrogen when the albumin has passed into the intestine.

The practical conclusion to be drawn by those who suffer from dyspeptic distension is to reduce to a minimum the substances already enumerated which give rise to normal flatulence.

It is not enough that in the air-borne dust, in the vapour from sewer and ditch, and in the contact with the animal world, disease may be carried to us; but it seems that our own juices may become poisonous, and the fluids which should give life kill by their rankness. Dr. Brieger has lately shown that meat treated with gastric juice, and kept for some little time at the temperature of the body, develops in small quantity a poisonous substance. This has been separated in a definite crystalline form, and is evidently allied to the class of organic bases which have been extracted from decomposing animal and vegetable matters, and have been given the generic name of "Ptomaines."

The complicated and diverse sensations experienced in what is popularly known as a fit of violent indigestion may therefore be due to an evil fermentation turning food into poison. The sickness and diarrhoea of indigestion may be the effects of a self-produced acrid ptomaine; sleepiness and heaviness of a narcotic, opium-like ptomaine; bad dreams, nightmare and ghostly visions of an atropine-like ptomaine, causing disorders of the special senses.

Said Scrooge to the shade of the dead Marley, "You may be an undigested bit of meat, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato"-a whimsical list of possibilities, in which the great novelist happily hits at the basis of not a few supernatural manifestations.

V.-ARTIFICIAL DIGESTIVES.

Two professions, having otherwise but little in common, have unconsciously co-operated in the prolongation of human life-the dentist supplying to edentulous gums artificial teeth; the chemist strengthening feeble secretions by artificial digestives.

Modern art has indeed separated several principles from the animal and vegetable world which have very special and peculiar powers of transforming and dissolving up both albuminous and vegetable matters when allowed to act upon them under certain conditions of temperature.

These principles may be divided into three classes-viz., meat solvents, starch solvents, and fat emulsifiers.

The meat solvent longest known is pepsin-as quinine is the active principle of bark, aconitine of monkshood; so may pepsin be said to be the active principle of the stomach. He who buys an ounce of pepsin has bought the digestive powers and virtues of many stomachs. Pepsin has never been prepared in a perfect state of purity, the very best samples always containing. traces of other substances. To find out whether a particular pepsin is active it is only necessary to dissolve a little of it in water, to add a drop of hydro-chloric acid, and then a small piece of the boiled white of an egg, keeping the temperature of the whole at about 100° F. If the sample be

good, the albumin in the course of half an hour will have wholly disappeared. Pepsin is not the only meat digester, several substances possessing properties nearly allied to pepsin having been discovered. One of the more interesting of these is "Ingluvin," extracted from the fowl's crop. The meat solvents are not confined to the animal world; the so-called "carnivorous" plants have gastric-juice-like fluids, which dissolve the bodies of the killed and entrapped insects, forming solutions which possibly nourish the plant.

The most powerful of all these food solvents is the juice of the papaw-tree, of which wonderful stories have been told. Thus Browne, in his "Natural History of Jamaica," says that meat becomes tender after being washed with water to which the juice of the papaw-tree has been added, and if left in such water ten minutes it will fal from the spit while roasting, or separate into threads while boiling.

Within the last few years Papain," the active principle of the plant, has been separated and carefully studied. It is in the form of a snow-white powder, very soluble in water, and possessing some remarkable properties.

One part of papain dissolves a thousand times its weight of fibrin, and instead of, like pepsin, acting only in acid solutions, it acts equally well in alkaline solutions. Kühne has shown that pancreatin destroys pepsin, so that the joint action of the two is not possible; but with papain it is different, papain and pancreatin may exist together and co-operate, each exercising its own peculiar functions. Added to this, papain seems to be a weak antiseptic, for meat moistened with a solution of papain keeps much longer than meat moistened with water. Time has not sufficed to ascertain whether these successful laboratory experimenta are borne out in actual practice; if they are, then papain will be the most powerful digester known.

The starch solvents are scientifically known under the generic term of "diastatic ferments;" their type is "diastase," a substance extracted from malt, and contained in malt extract. Diastase has the property of transforming starch into a kind of sugar. If, for example, a little diastase or good malt extract be added to a thin solution of potato starch, the solution being kept at blood heat, in from fifteen to twenty minutes the previously somewhat turbid solution becomes clear and limpid, and will no longer give a blue colour with iodine, which is a proof that all starch has disappeared, and further chemical tests will show that it has been changed into sugar.

The type of the fat emulsifiers is pancreatin, which is a substance extracted from the pancreas, or sweetbread, and has the property of acting on fatty matters and preparing them for digestion.

In these principles, then-pepsin, papain, and ingluvin for meats; malt extract for bread, biscuits, vegetables; and pancreatin for fats-we have agents which when added to food kept at a suitable temperature outside the body imitate the action of natural secretions inside the body. The feeble digestive powers, both of old people and of very young children, can by their aid re

ceive considerable assistance. But it is scarcely necessary to say that artificial digestion is never precisely similar to natural, and that it is not yet possible and never will be for anxious busy men avaricious of time spent in eating, to convert their necessary supply of albuminoids into peptones, of starches into sugar, of fats into emulsions-to drink a dinner at a draught and give no work for the salivary, peptic, or intestinal glands to do. All that can be reasonably expected is that just as an inflamed eye is kept from the light, so in acute dyspepsia the sick digestive organs may be given some little repose by the work being done outside, and that in congenital weakness and cases of senile feebleness partially digested nourishment may in this way be taken which in any other form would not be assimilated.

The application of physiological chemistry has been especially happy to "infant's foods." There was a time when thousands of unfortunate babies were literally starved to death by being crammed with various flours and powdered biscuits, which putrefied in the intestines, causing diarrhoea and other maladies. The best infant's foods are now "malted," that is, either mixed with ground malt or malt extract. On adding lukewarm water or milk to such foods and keeping them warm (not hot) for a few minutes, chemical transformations go on which serve excellently as a preparation for natural assimilation.

VI.-AVAILABLE AND LOCKED-UP NUTRIMENT.

The terms digestible and indigestible foods in a popular sense refer to the easy or uneasy sensations of the person taking the food; while in a physiological sense the amount of nutriment given up in the slow passage of the food downwards from the mouth through the canal is considered, or, as I have elsewhere expressed it, "digestible foods are those in which small solid residues leave the body, indigestible foods are those which yield large solid residues."

It is hence evident that digestibility is almost synonymous with solubility. A food like sugar readily dissolving in water being the type of the most easily digestible, while at the other end of the scale are completely insoluble substances, as for example the diamond (often enough swallowed for purposes of theft or concealment), and which, of course, can in no way be assimilated.

As the value of coal is determined by the amount of matter which gives heat and light, the ash being considered waste, similarly the residues passing from the alimentary canal are so much waste or ash, and have to be subtracted from the total weight of the food consumed. Science has been enriched by a number of researches which have had for their object the estimation of available as distinguished from apparent nutriment. The method of experiment has been various; much has been learnt by submitting edible substances, both raw and cooked, to the action of solutions of pepsin, pancreatin, and other digestive principles at the heat of the body and ascertaining the solvent effect. But by far the most valuable information has been gathered from

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Such physiological researches correct largely the conclusions which would otherwise be drawn from mere analysis. Take as an example the strong opinions held by some very well-intentioned people as to the superiority of whole-meal bread over ordinary bread opinions entirely based upon chemical analyses made in the early stages of scientific food lore, in which no distinction was made between the nitrogen which can be digested and the nitrogen which escapes. Whole-meal bread is a pleasant food, and yields to chemical analysis a higher percentage of nitrogen than white bread; but when equal weights of the ordinary and the whole-meal are passed through the body itself, 95 parts of the "white," and about 90 parts of the "whole-meal" disappear, the residue from the latter containing much nitrogen that is wholly insoluble; hence when submitted to this crucial test it is at once evident that 105 parts of whole-meal bread will have to be eaten to equal 100 ordinary bread. This proportion once obtained, the superiority of one above the other as food for the people is to be judged from a different standpoint-such as the price of the two kinds of bread, and any other properties they may possess.

VII. THE TIMES AND MANNER OF FEEDING INDICATED BY PHYSIOLOGY.

Another series of carefully arranged experiments have had for their object the determination of the length of time occupied by digestion. Some were made, many years ago, on an unfortunate Canadian, who, having a wound leading into his stomach, was at the time an object of much interest to the physiologists, who used to poke through the opening various foods, and after a little time remove them. A recent, more accurate, but very unpleasant method has been to operate upon healthy persons, getting them to swallow weighed pieces of meat, and then remov