Breakfast is with but few the principal meal of the day; for those, however, who rise early it is the one taken with the best appetite. This fact ought to induce all to give attention to this meal; especially those who early in the morning have worked hard already, and those who, mindful of the old saying, "Early to bed and early to rise Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise," intend not to idle away the precious morning hours. To him who is in the habit of laboring, and who loves to labor, an early breakfast has a peculiar charm; and, what is yet more important to him, it tastes well. It is customary with us to eat much bread. Bread has as its principal constituents, starch and sugar, and if it has been well baked, a part of the starch is already saccharine, that is, it is nearly transformed into sugar, thus greatly facilitating the process of digestion. French naturalists have lately written excellent treatises about the change which fresh bread undergoes when it becomes old. They prove that bread is most nutritive, and easiest to digest, when about a day old. Bread is changed in our bodies partly into fat, as all food is which contains starch. But this formation of fat is greatly facilitated, if we take a little ready-made fat with it. For this purpose we eat butter with our bread. Hence we see that some people are wrong when they believe butter to be a mere luxury; on the contrary, butter is a very important article of food, more especially so to children. The reason of this is, that the fat performs a conspicuous part in the human body; it serves to keep up the process of respiration. The oxygen which is inhaled, decomposes the fat in our body and from it forms water and carbonic acid. The water evaporates through perspiration; the carbonic acid is exhaled again. Now, if there is fat in us, this perspiration and exhalation will diminish it; but this very act of using up the fat preserves our flesh from being consumed in the process of producing carbonic acid and perspiration, which, if there were no fat, would greatly weaken us. Fat, thus to speak, is the spare-money, while flesh is the capital in the body. Fat itself does not make us strong, while flesh does. But where there is no fat, the processes of perspiration and respiration attack our flesh, which, unless abundantly reinforced, begins to disappear rapidly, while our strength begins to decrease more and more. Thence it comes that lean persons eat much, while we often are astonished to see how little food is taken by fat people. The lean one has no fat to meet the drain produced by perspiration and respiration; he breathes and perspires accordingly at the expense of his flesh, and, therefore, is obliged to continually take in a fresh supply of food. The fat person, meanwhile, does not live on his capital, the flesh and the blood, but on his supply of fat; as it were, he pays expenses from his spare-money, and for this reason loses very little in strength.