The Chemistry of Cookery

evening. The duration of coffee is about one-third less than tea. Lehmann’s experiments extending over weeks (days instead of minutes), measured the whole effect of the alkaloid and oil of the coffee during both the periods of exaltation and depression, and, therefore, supplied a mean or total result which accords with ordinary everyday experience. It is well known that the pot of tea of the poor needlewoman subdues the natural craving for food; the habitual smoker claims the same merit for his pipe, and the chewer for his quid. Wonderful stories are told of the long abstinence of the drinkers of maté, chewers of betel-nut, Siberian fungus, coca-leaf, and pepper-wort, and the smokers and eaters of haschisch, &c. Not only is the sense of hunger allayed, but less food is demanded for sustaining life. It is a curious fact that similar effects should be produced, and similar advantages claimed, for the use of a drug which is totally different in its other chemical properties and relations. ‘White arsenic,’ or arsenious acid, is the oxide of a metal, and far as the poles asunder from the alkaloids, alcohols, and aromatic resins in chemical classification. But it does check the waste of the tissues, and is eaten by the Styrians and others with physiological effects curiously resembling those of its chemical antipodeans above named. Foremost among these physiological effects is that of ‘making the food appear to go farther.’ It is strange that Liebig or any physiologist who accepts his views of vital chemistry, should claim this diminution of the normal waste and renewal of tissue as a merit, seeing that, according to Liebig, life itself is the product of such change, and death the result of its cessation. But in the eagerness that has been displayed to justify existing indulgences, this claim has been extensively made by men who ought to know better than to admit such a plea. I speak, as before, of the _habitual_ use of such drugs, not of their occasional medicinal use. The waste of the body may be going on with killing rapidity, as in fever,