The staple food was what he calls a ‘soup,’ but I find, on following out his instructions for making it, that I obtain a porridge rather than a soup. He made many experiments, and says: ‘I constantly found that the richness or quality of a soup depended more upon a proper choice of the ingredients, and a proper management of the fire in the combination of these ingredients, than upon the quantity of solid nutritious matter employed;—much more upon the art and skill of the cook than upon the sum laid out in the market.’ Our vegetarian friends will be interested in learning that at first he used meat in the soup provided for the beggars, but gradually omitted it, and the change was unnoticed by those who ate, and no difference was observable as regards its nutritive value. In 1790, little, or rather nothing, was known of the chemistry of food. Oxygen had been discovered only sixteen years before, and chemical analysis, as now understood, was an unknown art. In spite of this Rumford selected as the basis of his soup just that proximate element which we now know to be one of the most nutritious that he could have obtained from either the animal or vegetable kingdom—viz. _casein_. He not only selected this, but he combined it with those other constituents of food which our highest refinements of modern practical chemistry and physiology have proved to be exactly what are required to supplement the casein and constitute a complete dietary. By selecting the cheapest form of casein and the cheapest sources of the other constituents, he succeeded in supplying the beggars with good hot dinners daily at the cost of less than one halfpenny each. The cost of the mess for the Bavarian soldiers under his command was rather more, viz. twopence daily, three farthings of this being devoted to pure luxuries, such as beer, &c. Some of his chemical speculations, however, have not been confirmed. The composition of water had just been discovered, and he found by experience that a given quantity of solid food was more satisfying to the appetite and more effective in nutrition when made into soup by long boiling with water. This led him to suppose that the water itself was decomposed by cookery, and its elements recombined or united with other elements, and thus became nutritious by being converted into the tissues of plants and animals. Thus, speaking of the barley which formed an important constituent of his soup, he says: ‘It requires, it is true, a great deal of boiling; but when it is properly managed, it thickens a vast quantity of water, and, as I suppose, _prepares it for decomposition_’ (the italics are his own).