Various substances have been and are employed for making this needful article.  Until the last few decades, barley was the grain most universally used.  Chestnuts, ground to a flour, are made into bread in regions where these nuts abound.  Quite recently, an immense peanut crop in the Southern States was utilized for bread-making purposes.  In ancient times, the Thracians made to bread from a flour made from the water coltran, a prickly root of triangular form.  In Syria, mulberries were dried and grounded to flour.  Rice, moss, palm tree piths, and starch producing roots are used by different nationalities in the preparation of bread.  In many parts of Sweden, bread is made from dried fish, using one half fish flour and one half barley flour; and in winter, flour made from the bark of trees is added.  Desiccated tomatoes, potatoes, and other vegetables are also mixed with the cereals for bread-making.  In India, the lower classes make their bread chiefly from millet.  Moss bread is made in Iceland from the reindeer moss, which toward autumn becomes soft, tender, and moist, with a taste like wheat bran.  It contains a large quantity of starch, and the Icelanders gather, dry, pulverize it, and thus prepare it for bread-making.  The ancient Egyptians often made their bread from equal parts of the whole grain and meal.

The breadstuff’s most universally used among civilized nations at the present time are barley, rye, oats, maize, buckwheat, rice, and wheat, of which the last has acquired a decided preference.

If made in the proper manner and from suitable material, bread is, with the exception of milk, the article best fitted for the nourishment of the body, and if need be, can supply the place of all other foods.  Good bread does not cloy the appetite as do many other articles of food, and the simplest bill of fare which includes light, wholesome bread, is far more satisfying than an elaborate meal without it.  Were the tables of our land supplied with good, nutritious, well-baked bread, there would be less desire for cake, pastry, and other indigestible particles, which, under the present system of cookery, are allowed to compensate for the inferior quality and poor preparation of more wholesome foods.

Bread has been proverbially styled the “staff of life.”  In nearly all ancient languages the entomology of the word “bread” signifies all, indicating; that the bread of earlier periods was in truth what it should be at the present time,—­a staff upon which all the functions of life might with safety depend.

Notwithstanding the important part bread was designed to play in the economy of life, it would be hardly possible to mention another aliment which so universally falls below the standard either through the manner of its preparation or in the material used.