According to the statement of Prof. Thomson, of Edinburgh, one pound of good wheat meal contains ten ounces of farina or starch, three ounces of bran, six drams of gluten and two drams of sugar;—and it is because wheat contains such proportions of these substances that it makes the very best loaf bread. The farina or starch is the principal nourishing property;—the saccharine matter or sugar is also highly nutrient; but in the process of making loaf bread, it serves mainly, by its vinous fermentation, to produce the gas or air by which the dough is raised and the bread made light. The gluten is likewise a very nutrient property, but in loaf bread, it principally serves, by its cohesiveness, like gum elastic, or India rubber, to prevent the gas or air formed by the fermentation of the sugar, from escaping or passing off;—and the gas being thus retained, inflates or puffs up the dough, and makes it porous and light. The bran, with its mucilaginous and other properties, not only adds to the nutritiousness of the bread, but eminently serves to increase its digestibility, and to invigorate the digestive organs, and preserve the general integrity of their functions. The wheat which is raised in Virginia and the southern states generally, contains a larger proportion of gluten than that which is raised in the western part of the state of New York. Hence bakers are able to make a larger loaf of bread out of a pound of southern flour than they can out of a pound of western flour; and consequently some of them have endeavored to make their customers believe that the southern flour is the most profitable. It certainly _is_ the most profitable for the baker; but it is not the most profitable for the consumer. The next thing indispensably necessary to the making of good bread, is good lively sweet yeast, or leaven, to produce what is called the panary, or more properly, the vinous fermentation of the saccharine matter, or sugar. Some bread-makers will do best with one kind of yeast or leaven, and some with another. I have generally found that people do best with those materials to which they have been most accustomed; but I am sorry to find so general a dependence on breweries for yeast. To say nothing of the impure and poisonous substances which brewers employ in the manufacture of beer, and which always affect the quality of their yeast, I am confident that domestic yeast can be made of a far superior quality. However light and good in other respects that bread may be which is made with brewers yeast, I have rarely if ever seen any in which I could not at once detect the disagreeable properties of the yeast. There are various ways of making domestic yeast. One of the simplest, and perhaps the best, is the following, which was communicated to me by one of the best bread-makers I ever saw: