We will uphold London milk. Mr. Rugg says that it is apt to contain chalk, the brains of sheep, oxen, and cows, flour, starch, treacle, whiting, sugar of lead, arnotto, size, etc. Who cares for Mr. Rugg? London milk is better than country milk, for London cows are town cows. They live in a city, in close sheds, in our own dear alleys—are consumptive—they are delightful cows; only their milk is too strong, it requires watering and doctoring, and then it is delicious milk. Tea we are not quite sure about. Some people say that because tea took so sudden a hold upon the human appetite, because it spread so widely in so short a time, that therefore it supplies a want: its use is natural. Liebig suggests that it supplies a constituent of bile. I think rather that its use has become general because it causes innocent intoxication. Few men are not glad to be made cheerful harmlessly. For this reason I think it is that the use of tea and coffee has become popular; and since whatever sustains cheerfulness advances health—the body working with good will under a pleasant master—tea does our service little good. In excess, no doubt, it can be rendered hurtful (so can bread and butter); but the best way of pressing it into employment, as an ægritudinary aid, is by the practice of taking it extremely hot. A few observations upon the temperature at which food is refused by all the lower animals, will soon convince you that in man—not as regards tea only, but in a great many respects—Art has established her own rule, and that the Appetite of Nature has been conquered. We have a great respect for alcoholic liquors. It has been seen that the excess of these makes fat; they, therefore, who have least need of fat, according to our rules, are those who have most need of wine and beer. Of ordinary meats there is not much to say, We have read of Dr. Beaumont’s servant, who had an open musket-hole leading into his stomach, through which the doctor made experiments. Many experiments were made, and tables drawn of no great value on the digestibility of divers kinds of meat. Climate and habit are, on such points, paramount. Pig is pollution to the children of the Sun, the Jew, and Mussulman; but children of winter, the Scandinavians, could not imagine Paradise complete without it. Schrimner, the sacred hog, cut up daily and eaten by the tenants of Walhalla, collected his fragments in the night, and was in his sty again ready for slaughter the next morning. These things concern us little, for it is not with plain meat that we have here to do, but with the noble art of Cookery. That art, which once obeyed and now commands our appetite, which is become the teacher where it was the taught, we duly reverence. When ægritudinary science shall obtain its college, and when each Unhealthy Course shall have its eminent professor to teach Theory and Practice—then we shall have a Court of Aldermen for Patrons, a Gravedigger for Principal, and a Cook shall be Dean of Faculty.