d, twenty-four hours old, would be rejected by ninety-nine
persons in a hundred; and by some with abhorrence.

People not only dislike bread, but regard it as unnutritious. I have
heard many a fond parent say to the child who ate no meat, and seemed to
depend almost wholly on bread--"Why, my dear child, you will starve if
you eat no meat. Do at least put some butter on your bread or your
potatoes." A thousand times have I been admonished, when eating my
vegetable dinner during the hot and fatiguing days of summer--for I was
bred to the farm, and ate little or no meat till I was fourteen years
of age--to eat more butter, or cheese, or something that would give me
strength; for I could not work, they said, without something more
nourishing than bread and the other vegetables. And yet few if any boys
of my age did more work, or performed it better, or with more ease, than
myself. And I early observed the same thing in other vegetable eaters.

The truth is, there is nothing in the world better adapted to the daily
wants of the human stomach than good bread; and few things more
nutritious. There may be a little more nutriment in eggs or jelly; but
if the former are hard-boiled, the stomach cannot digest them; and fat
meat of any kind is digested with great difficulty. Indeed it is
doubtful whether stomachs in temperate climates digest fat at all. They
may dissolve it, but that is not making good chyle of it. They may even
reduce it to chyle; _but chyle is not blood_. Fat may slip through the
system without much of it _adhering_; and I think it pretty evident that
it usually does so.

The muscle--the lean part of animals--may be nearly as nutritious as
good bread, and is more easily digested. But it is very far from being
proved that, for the healthy, those things are always best which are
most easily digested. Nobody will pretend that potatoes are better for
us than bread; and yet the experiments of Dr. Beaumont seem to prove
that boiled or roasted potatoes are much more quick and easy of
digestion than bread of the first and best quality. Even over-boiled
eggs and raw cabbage, bad as they are, are dissolved in the stomach, and
appear to be digested as quick, if not quicker, than good wheat bread.
But nobody in the world will pretend they form more wholesome food.
Neither is meat--even _lean_ meat--necessarily more wholesome, or better
calculated to give strength than bread, simply be cause it is more
quickly and easily di