He then takes from eight to ten pounds of potatoes and boils them, without removing the skins, afterwards mashing them in the seasoning tub, with about half the quantity of flour, and adding a couple of pails of water. To this mixture he pours about two quarts of yeast, made from the liquor of boiled hops, malt, and patent yeast already made and sold for the purpose. This is the leaven, which makes the difference between bread and meal-cake, or the English loaf and the Australian “damper,” which is made only of flour and water, and baked at a bush fire; the yeast or leaven is, in fact, meal in its early state of decomposition. This mixture then is left in the seasoning tub, covered with a sack for several hours, and allowed to ferment. Then the Baker separates about a quarter of the flour in the trough by means of a board, and piles it up at one end apart from the larger quantity, and it is upon this that he pours the contents of the seasoning tub, taking care that it passes through a sieve placed on a couple of sticks across the trough. This portion upon which the liquor has been poured is called the _sponge_, and he proceeds to “set it” by thoroughly mixing, and finally giving it a dust of flour at the top, after which it is kept for five or six hours, or until it has twice “risen,” or puffed out by means of the fermenting liquor within it. Just as it has risen a second time, and air bubbles are breaking through it to the surface, about three more pailfuls of water are poured upon it, and in this water about three pounds of salt have been dissolved; this is well mixed with the sponge, and then, the board being removed, the sponge and the rest of the flour is worked into one mass. It is this kneading and breaking up the sponge which is the hard labour of the Baker, and that it is hard labour may be known from the fact that he works nearly naked, and that, as he lifts and pummels the tenacious mass, he heaves great sighs and groans like those with which paviors ram down the stones in the roads. In many of the best bakehouses now a machine is used, which supersedes this manual labour; the mass of dough being placed in a cylinder, within which an axle fitted with bent blades, or arms of iron, revolves, passing through and through the dough as it moves from end to end. By another system (that of Dr. Dauglish) the use of yeast is dispensed with, and the bread, made by machinery, is leavened by carbonic acid gas, which is forced into the cylinder after the atmospheric air is pumped out, and so goes through the dough and produces the results of fermentation.