blood flows wherever living flesh is pricked) in
every part of the substance of the animal. For
general purposes the preserving fluid may be
made with a gallon of saturated brine and three
ounces of saltpetre to the hundred-weight, but
Professor Morgan points out that important
constituents of food — sugar, for example, and a
dash of phosphoric acid, half an ounce to the
hundred-weight— may be artificially added; and
even spicing and flavouring with pepper, cloves,
and condiments, lactic acid, or sauer-kraut. If
it be desired at once to coagulate the albumen
and give a "set" to the meat, a boiling-hot
injection can be used, or it can be used cold. In
this process there is no machinery nor costly
plant required. A large cask fixed aloft will
serve for a tank, and the apparatus is only a
pipe, and a gutta percha tube with a stop-cock,
no more than one man can carry. A whole ox
can in this way be prepared with ease in ten
minutes, at the cost of not more than a shilling;
a sheep can be prepared for a few pence; and,
after the meat has been lying about three-
quarters of an hour to give time for saturation
of the tissues, it can at once be cut up into
pieces of whatever size and form may be thought
most convenient and suitable for drying. Dried
between decks or aloft if the fresh meat be thus
stored on board ship, or anywhere in a good
current of air, with or without a little smoke—
this becomes dry meat, from which not one of
the essential constituents has been removed, and
to which even some essentials of health may
have been added. Such meat so dried can be
packed in cases of sheet iron, in barrels or tins,
either after dipping each piece in melted fat to
prevent contact with moisture, or by packing
in dry sawdust, or sawdust and charcoal mixed
in equal parts. When it is to be used, it is
washed free from packing dust, steeped or not
steeped for a few hours in cold water, and then
cooked at discretion. It will broil into tender
steaks, or roast, or boil, or hash, or make a rich
soup fit even for the use of invalids. Retaining
all its requisite ingredients, because of the loss
of water, this dry meat packs into one-third the
compass of fresh meat, or of the unmanageable,
half-nutritious cured meat in its bath of brine.

For use in the army and navy this method
has the great advantage that, if two or three
men in every ship or regiment understood the
very simple use of an apparatus costing only a
few shillings, whenever the ship touched or
the regiment came where oxen or sheep could
be bought, a fresh store of the best provisions
could, at only a nominal outlay for the curing
process, be laid in quickly and easily.

Professor Morgan adds to his explanation of
a method that speaks for itself, one or two
notes of experiments made for the testing of its
efficacy.

He says: "In January and February last I
was allowed to prepare fifteen oxen for the
Admiralty at Deptford. In twenty-four hours
some of the meat was packed as usual in barrels,
and some pieces put to dry in the most convenient
situations at the victualling yard. With
part, a very great heat in the biscuit-drying
loft (about a hundred and twenty degrees)
was used successfully, and the drying
accomplished in a few days. Other pieces were hung
in the cooperage chimney, and dried after a few
weeks' time. By the report of the officers, both
these meats having been packed dry in ordinary
barrels till August 30, 1864, when opened and
examined at that date were pronounced
perfectly preserved, showing that so far, after the
lapse of seven months, the material is sound,
and capable of preservation through the hot
summer months, in barrels, and that without
the erection of any special apparatus, in the first
instance, as would be desirable for the drying.

"In June and August last I operated before
a commission at Rochefort, appointed by the
French government, and prepared both oxen
and sheep, in the height of a continental
summer, with perfect success, though with but
extemporised apparatus. When dried some time,
the meats were prepared as ragoût, beefsteak,
chop, the latter of course grilled. Nothing
could be better, particularly than the beefsteak.
Soup was also prepared of excellent flavour and
appearance, thus showing the value of this
material for invalids, while from the artificial
addition of sugar, phosphoric acid, potash, &c., it is
manifestly particularly suited to the requirements
of the sailor— invalid or in health."

Of the millions of cattle and sheep in South
America and Australia and in the Falkland
Islands, whose dried flesh may be used for
giving health and strength to the overcrowded
labourers of the old countries, only a little meat
has found its way into the three kingdoms.
Though not so palatable as our own butchers'
meat, it is, in proportion to the nourishment
contained in it, five times as cheap. As
compared with the corned or impoverished beef of
our army and navy, which is often so hard that it
can be carved into ornaments like wood, the beef
from Monte Video is found to contain in a
hundred parts three instead of twenty-one of
fat, but fifty-seven instead of seven of the
nitrogenised substance, and twenty-one or more
instead of ten parts of the ash, which represent
the most essential constituents of food. A young
Dublin surgeon was sent out to Monte Video
last March to cure some of the beef there
according to Professor Morgan's plan, and a
hundred bullocks' carcases have been prepared and
forwarded, preserved whole without cutting and
drying, the skin even to the tip of the tail being
supplied with blood-vessels, to which the
preserving fluid penetrates in following the course
of the blood's circulation. Medicated meat has
been prepared very successfully in this manner
as tonic hams, charged with a small but sufficient
(and in that form tasteless) dose of iron.

And what as to the quantity of meat on which
we may draw for cheap food when the new class
of merchant butchers shall have learnt what
they can do? On the Pampas of South America,
to look there only, cattle have increased to a
fabulous number, all descended from some dozen
animals brought by the settlers from old Spain