Persons who have travelled much on the continent are well aware that our neighbours have the art of throwing much more variety and gratification of the palate into the article of subsistence which has been emphatically called the staff of life, than we possess. The French and Germans convert the farinaceous flour of vegetables into a variety of excellent articles of food, and not serving, like our own, as a mere companion to pair off with so many mouthfuls of meat. In speaking thus of the use of bread, I do not mean to deny that bread is highly alimentary, its nourishing powers are undoubtedly very great. The finest bread, says an eminent physician (Dr. Buchan), is not always the best adapted for answering the purposes of nutrition. Household bread, which is made by grinding the whole grain, and only separating the coarse bran, is, without doubt, the most wholesome. The people of South Britain generally prefer bread made of the finest wheat flour, while those of the Northern countries eat a mixture of flour and oatmeal, or rye bread. The common people of Scotland also eat a mixed bread, but more frequently bread made of oatmeal only. In Germany the common bread is made of rye. The flour of millet is made in France, Spain, and Italy, into wholesome and nourishing pastry and puddings. The American and West Indian labourer thinks no bread so strengthening as that which is made of Indian corn. The inhabitants of Westphalia, who are a hardy and robust people, capable of enduring the greatest fatigues, live on a coarse brown rye bread, which still retains the opprobrious name once given to it by a French traveller, “_Bon pour Nicole_—good for his horse Nichol.” The great advantage of eating pure and genuine bread must be obvious; but bread is often spoiled to please the eye. I have elsewhere[1] shewn, that in the making of bread, more especially in London, various ingredients are occasionally mingled with the dough. The baker is obliged to suit the caprice of his customers, to have his bread light and porous, and of a pure white colour. It is impossible to produce this sort of bread from flour alone, unless it be of the finest quality. The best flour, however, being mostly used by the biscuit bakers and pastry cooks, it is only from the inferior sorts that bread is made; and it becomes necessary, in order to have it of that light and porous quality, and of a fine white, to mix alum with the dough. Without this ingredient the flour used by the London bakers would not yield so white a bread as that sold in this metropolis, and herein consists the fraud, that the baker is enabled by the use of this ingredient to produce, from bad materials, bread that is light, white, and porous, but of which the quality does not correspond to the appearance, and thus to impose upon the public. Footnote 1: Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons, 2nd Edit. 1820, p. 130.