salt, and this forms, with the invaluable juices
of the meat, a brine amounting in bulk to one-
third of the fluid contained in the raw flesh.
That brine, which is so much food destroyed,
actually contains the chief constituents of a
concentrated soup or infusion of the meat. It
has drawn out that essential of food, the albumen,
and, by so doing, left the fibres unshielded to
contract and harden. It has drawn out the
phosphoric acid in its phosphates, the lactic
acid, a large quantity of the potash, and of other
vital principles. That done, it is packed in brine
and headings of salt, to suffer further loss of its
essential constituents, leaving the residuum of
mere fibrine so hard that it often requires to be
cut with a saw or chopper instead of a knife.
That hardness is even looked upon as one of the
tests of good cure, though it is the sign of a
degree of privation of its requisite constituents
that makes the meat unfit to serve its purpose in
the reproduction of the flesh of those who eat it.
Lemon-juice has to be used as one means of
making up for the loss. This process of curing
is, in fact, said by Liebig to destroy the nourishing
power of one hundred-weight in three of all
the meat attacked by it. In Glasgow alone,
albumen equal in amount to a hundred and
eighty-seven tons of meat, and, at sixpence a
pound, equal in value to more than ten thousand
pounds of money, is lost every winter. We
destroy in this way twenty-five thousand pounds'
worth of meat every curing season. A further
loss occurs in the use of this cured meat from
the fact that it can be cooked only in one way,
by boiling. Yet more of its juices then pass into
the liquor, which is too salt to be used in food
as a broth, or as the basis of a soup or gravy. It
is the presence in it of all those soluble essentials
of healthy flesh that makes the soup of meat—
which contains no fibrin, but only that part
which the curer draws out into his brine— so
nourishing and invigorating as it is known by
experience to be. A dog fed upon bread and
gelatine lost one-third of its weight, and was
about to die. Four tablespooufuls of soup were
then added to each mess, and from that time the
animal recovered. What was thus added to the
animal food of the dog, is what, in his salt junk,
is taken away from the animal food of the
sailor.

The meats preserved in tins as sick comforts
are made costly by the bulk and waste of the
innutritious fluid necessary for the boiling, the
gelatine soup that forms a considerable part of
the package. A gelatine commission at Paris,
under the physiologist Majendie, fed dogs
liberally with gelatine as long as they would eat
it. After a time they refused to touch it, and
died as soon as dogs of the same size, age, and
weight who had eaten nothing; sooner by six,
eight, or ten days, than dogs supplied with water
and no food. French scientific men tried till
their health would bear no more the effect of a
gelatine diet upon themselves. And the result
of all the inquiry was, "that gelatine, so far
from increasing, diminishes the nutritive value
of food, as it does not disappear in the body
without leaving a residue." We still often see
jelly in a sick-room used with the superstition
that an invalid is nourished by the use of it.
There is a little stimulus in any wine it may
contain, a little wholesomeness in any dash of
lemon-juice, mechanical value as a means of
moistening the lips; but as food, the jelly is of
absolutely less use than an equal quantity of
water. The juices of meat in strong broths,
milk, cream, and a little wine or brandy of the
purest quality, are, with water or lemonade,
when solid meat cannot be taken, the best
supports of the sick body.

Urging the knowledge of the day against the
barbarous fashion of meat-curing hitherto in
use, and backed by the emphatic testimony of
Baron Liebig to the value of his own suggestion,
Mr. John Morgan, professor of anatomy
to the Irish Royal College of Surgeons, urges
the adoption of a new and very simple and
effectual process for the preservation of meat
for food. His method is obviously sound, and
it has been tested both in England and France
with the best results. The animal is killed by
a blow on the head that pierces the brain, and
causes instantaneous death. The chest is
immediately opened, and the heart has two cuts
made in it; one into the right side, by which out
rushes the blood of the veins; and one into the
left side, in the left ventricle, by which out
rushes the blood of the arteries. When the
blood has ceased flowing, a pipe is introduced
through the left ventricle into the great blood-
vessel, the aorta, which is the trunk from which
the whole system of arteries branch out to
connect themselves by innumerable small ramifications,
called the capillary vessels, throughout
the whole substance of the body with the points
of the ramifications of the return system of
veins. Then the small veins run into the
greater, and all tend to run together till they
pour their current, aërated by the lungs, in full
stream back into the heart. The pipe introduced
into the one great arterial vessel, by which
the circulation of blood through the body starts
out of the heart, is coupled to a stop-cock fixed to
twenty or thirty feet of gutta percha tubing, by
which, when the stop-cock is turned, brine, with
a little nitre, flows from a tank raised as high as
the tube into the emptied blood-vessels. Thus
the brine is forced by hydraulic pressure through
the whole circulating system so readily, that
in a few seconds it begins to rush out at the
other side of the heart, and in about two minutes
it will have all run through the arteries,
capillaries, and veins even of an ox, washing them
thoroughly. This is the preliminary rinse. All
the ways being made clear and clean, the incision
on the right side of the heart is closed with a
strong sliding forceps. There is put into the tank
above, or is ready in another tank, whatever
preservative material it is desired to use; the stop-
cock is turned, and this preserving fluid
circulates also. This time it cannot rush out at
the other side of the heart, so that it distends
the vessels and is taken up by the flesh
surrounding the minute capillaries (whence the