The Chemistry of Cookery

of food without supplying nutriment, and increases the loss of heat without supplying fuel, and _it is therefore especially adapted to the wants of those who usually eat too much_, and after a full meal, when the process of assimilation should be quickened, but _is less adapted to the poor and ill-fed_, and during fasting.’ He tells us very positively that ‘to take tea before a meal is as absurd as not to take it after a meal, unless the system be at all times replete with nutritive material.’ And, again: ‘Our experiments have sufficed to show how tea may be _injurious if taken with deficient food, and thereby exaggerate the evils of the poor_;’ and, again: ‘The conclusions at which we arrived after our researches in 1858 were, that tea should not be taken without food, unless after a full meal; or with insufficient food; or by the young or very feeble; and that _its essential action is to waste the system or consume food_, by promoting vital action which it does not support, and they have not been disproved by any subsequent scientific researches.’ This final assertion may be true, and to those who ‘go in for the last thing out,’ the latest novelty or fashion in science, literature, or millinery, the absence of any refutation of later date is quite enough. But how about the previous ‘scientific researches’ of Lehmann, who, on all such subjects, is about the highest authority that can be quoted. His three volumes on ‘Physiological Chemistry,’ translated and republished by the Cavendish Society, stand pre-eminent as the best-written, most condensed, and complete work on the subject, and his original researches constitute a lifetime’s work, not of mere random change-ringing among the elements of obscure and insignificant organic compounds, but of judiciously selected chemical work, having definite philosophical aims and objects. It is evident from the passages I have emphatically quoted that Dr. Smith flatly contradicts Lehmann, and arrives at directly contradictory physiological results and practical inferences. Are we, therefore, to conclude that he has blundered in his analysis, or that Lehmann has done