Pease, beans, and lentils are so extremely rich in fat and muscle-forming elements, that in this regard they excel bread and are almost on a level with meat. No wonder, therefore, that they are very favorite articles if well cooked, when we consider the fact that they are so very cheap. Where people are too poor to buy meat every day, legumes must not be found wanting. They play a great part in barracks and prisons; and in order to keep pace with the immense progress gastronomical science has made, one of the above-named articles ought to be used in those establishments on all days on which there is no meat. The element common to all three is called legumine. It is richer in starch than bread and contains nearly three times more of it than the potato. Partly legumes contain also ready-made sugar; this may be tasted in green pease. Besides this, their flesh-forming parts are in greater quantity than those of other plants, while their quantity of water is less, and it is therefore not advisable to take them dry. New pease and beans have, moreover, the advantage of being eatable together with their hulls and pods, as these, when yet green, contain likewise sugar and starch. But we must recommend, above all, not to eat the hulls of dried legumes. This may be avoided if, when boiled, the cook crushes them and strains them through a coarse sieve, by which process the hulls are left. If this is not done, we run the danger of disturbing the functions of the body, inasmuch as these dry hulls are dissolved neither by the saliva of the mouth nor the gastric juice of the stomach. Most every one that once in his life had culinary labor to perform, is acquainted with the fact that the cooking of legumes is often accompanied by a peculiar circumstance. Pease sometimes may boil by the hour without getting soft; it happens even that young pease, soft by nature, become harder and harder by boiling; while, at other times, the same pease have become soft and burst open after but half an hour's cooking. The reason of this lies not in the pease, but in the water they are boiled in. Our housewives undoubtedly know, from the experience of their wash-days, that there is hard water and soft. Soap, when put in hard water, breaks into small pieces, while it dissolves in soft water completely and forms a slimy liquid. Science has solved this mystery: spring-water contains lime, which combines chemically with the fat in soap and forms with it an insoluble element; while rain-water contains little or no lime, and therefore dissolves soap. The same is the case in regard to the legumine. The lime in spring-water, which settles on the bottom of vessels as sediment, combines with some constituent parts of the pea and forms a very hard, indigestible body; rain-water, however, dissolves legumine completely.