The truth is, there is nothing in the world better adapted to the daily wants of the human stomach than good bread; and few things more nutritious.  There may be a little more nutriment in eggs or jelly; but if the former are hard-boiled, the stomach cannot digest them; and fat meat of any kind is digested with great difficulty.  Indeed it is doubtful whether stomachs in temperate climates digest fat at all.  They may dissolve it, but that is not making good chyle of it.  They may even reduce it to chyle; but chyle is not blood.  Fat may slip through the system without much of it adhering; and I think it pretty evident that it usually does so.

The muscle—­the lean part of animals—­may be nearly as nutritious as good bread, and is more easily digested.  But it is very far from being proved that, for the healthy, those things are always best which are most easily digested.  Nobody will pretend that potatoes are better for us than bread; and yet the experiments of Dr. Beaumont seem to prove that boiled or roasted potatoes are much more quick and easy of digestion than bread of the first and best quality.  Even over-boiled eggs and raw cabbage, bad as they are, are dissolved in the stomach, and appear to be digested as quick, if not quicker, than good wheat bread.  But nobody in the world will pretend they form more wholesome food.  Neither is meat—­even lean meat—­necessarily more wholesome, or better calculated to give strength than bread, simply be cause it is more quickly and easily digested.  It would be nearer the truth to say, that those substances which digest slowest (provided they do not irritate) are best adapted to the wants of the human stomach.

The philosopher LOCKE—­perhaps from his knowledge of medicine—­gives some excellent directions on this subject.  “Great care should be used,” be says, that the child “eat bread plentifully, both alone and with everything else; and whatever he eats that is solid, make him chew it well.”  This writer, by the way, supposed that the teeth were made to be used in beating our food; and that we ought neither to swallow it without chewing, as is customary in our busy New England, nor to mash or soak it in order to save the labor of mastication—­a practice almost equally universal.  But let us hear his own words.

“As for his diet, it ought to be very plain and simple; and if I might advise, flesh should be forborne, at least till he is two or three years old.  But of whatever advantage this may be to his future health and strength, I fear it will hardly be consented to by parents, misled by the custom of eating too much flesh themselves, who will be apt to think their children—­as they do themselves—­in danger to be starved; if they have not flesh at least twice a day.  This I am sure, children would breed their teeth with much less danger, be freer from diseases while they were little, and lay the foundations of a healthy and strong constitution much surer, if they were not crammed so much as they are, by fond mothers and foolish servants, and were kept wholly from flesh the first three or four years of their lives.”