Our case is now made out. Weight for weight, the whole grain or meal is more rich in all these three essential elements of a nutritive food, than the fine flour of wheat. By those whose only desire is to sustain their health and strength by the food they eat, ought not the whole meal to be preferred? To children who are rapidly growing, the browner the bread they eat, the more abundant the supply of the materials from which their increasing bones and muscles are to be produced. To the milk-giving mother, the same food, and for a similar reason, is the most appropriate. A glance at their mutual relations in regard to the three substances, presented in one view, will show this more clearly. A thousand pounds of each contain of the three several ingredients the following proportions. Whole meal. Fine flour. Muscular matter, 156 lbs. 130 lbs. Bone material, 170 " 60 " Fat, 28 " 20 " Total in each, 354 210 Taking the three ingredients, therefore, together, the whole meal is one-half more valuable for fulfilling all the purposes of nutrition than the fine flour--and especially it is so in regard to the feeding of the young, the pregnant, and those who undergo much bodily fatigue. It will not be denied that it is for a wise purpose that the Deity has so intimately associated, in the grain, the several substances which are necessary for the complete nutrition of animal bodies. The above considerations show how unwise we are in attempting to undo this natural collocation of materials. To please the eye and the palate, we sift out a less generally nutritive food,--and, to make up for what we have removed, experience teaches us to have recourse to animal food of various descriptions. It is interesting to remark, even in apparently trivial things, how all nature is full of compensating processes. We give our servants household bread, while we live on the finest of the wheat ourselves. The mistress eats that which pleases the eye more, the maid what sustains and nourishes the body better. But the whole meal is more wholesome, as well as more nutritive. It is on account of its superior wholesomeness that those who are experienced in medicine usually recommend it to our attention. Experience in the laws of digestion brings us back to the simple admixture found in the natural seed. It is not an accidental thing that the proportions in which the ingredients of a truly sustaining food take their places in the seeds on which we live, should be best fitted at once to promote the health of the sedentary scholar, and to reinvigorate the strength of the active man when exhausted by bodily labour.