ay best suited to our use--is really the most important of all
sciences, and the mother of the arts. The wonderful theory that the most
ignorant cookery is the most favorable to health is only fit for the
dark ages. It is grossly and stupidly untrue. A scientific cook will
keep you in regular health, when an ignorant one will offer you the
daily alternative of starving or indigestion.

The great question of drinks is scarcely less important. Sound natural
wines, not strengthened by any addition of alcohol, are known to supply
both stimulus and nourishment to the brain. Goethe's practice was not
irrational, though he drank fifty thousand bottles in his lifetime.
Still it is not necessary to imitate him to this extent. The
wine-drinking populations have keener and livelier wits than those who
use other beverages. It is proved by long experience that the pure juice
of the grape sustains the force and activity of the brain. The poets who
from age to age have sung the praise of wine were not wholly either
deceivers or deceived. In the lands of the vine, where the plant is
looked upon as a nursing mother, men do not injure their health by
drinking; but in the colder North, where the grape can never ripen, the
deaths from intemperance are frequent. Bread and wine are almost pure
gifts of nature, though both are prepared by man after the old
traditional ways. These are not poisons, but gin and absinthe are
poisons, madness poured out from a bottle! Kant and Goethe loved the
pure Rhine wine, and their brains were clear and vigorous to the utmost
span of life. It was not wine that ruined Burns and Byron, or
Baudelaire, or Alfred de Musset.

Notwithstanding Kant's horror of beer, that honest northern drink
deserves our friendly recognition. It has quite a peculiar effect upon
the nervous system, giving a rest and calm which no other drink can
procure for it so safely. It is said that beer drinkers are slow, and a
little stupid; that they have an ox-like placidity not quite favorable
to any brilliant intellectual display. But there are times when this
placidity is what the laboring brain most needs. After the agitations of
too active thinking there is safety in a tankard of ale. The wine
drinkers are agile, but they are excitable; the beer drinkers are heavy,
but in their heaviness there is peace. In that clear golden drink which
England has brewed for more than a thousand Octobers, and will brew for
a thousand more, we may find p