The idea of malt feeding was theoretically sound. By the malting of barley or other grain its diastase is made to act upon its insoluble starch, and to convert this more or less completely into soluble dextrin, a change which is absolutely necessary as a part of the business of digestion. Therefore, if you feed cattle on malted grain instead of raw grain, you supply them with a food so prepared that a part of the business of digestion is already done for them, and their nutrition is thereby advanced. From what I am able to learn, the reason why this hopeful theory has not been carried out is simply that it does not ‘pay.’ The advantage in fattening the cattle is not sufficient to remunerate the farmers for the extra cost of the malted food. This may be the case with oxen, but it does not follow that it should be the same with human beings. Cattle feed on grass, mangold-wurzels, &c., in their raw state, but we cannot; and, as I have already shown, we are not graminivorous in the manner they are; we cannot digest raw wheat, barley, oats, or maize. We cannot do this because we are not supplied with such effective natural grinding apparatus as they have in their mouths, and, further, because we have a much smaller supply of saliva and a shorter alimentary canal. We can easily supply our natural deficiencies in the matter of grinding, and do so by means of our flour mills, but at first thought the idea of finding an artificial representative of the saliva of oxen does not recommend itself. When, however, it is understood that the chief active principle of the saliva so closely resembles the diastase of malt that it has received the name of ‘animal diastase,’ and is probably the same compound, the aspect of the problem changes. Not only is this the case with the secretion from the glands surrounding the mouth, but the pancreas which is concerned in a later stage of digestion is a gland so similar to the salivary glands that in ordinary cookery both are dressed and served as ‘sweetbreads;’ the ‘pancreatic juice’ is a liquid closely resembling saliva, and contains a similar diastase, or substance that converts starch into dextrin, and from dextrin to sugar. Lehmann says, ‘It is now indubitably established that the pancreatic juice possesses this sugar-forming power in a far higher degree than the saliva.’ Besides this, there is another sugar-forming secretion, the ‘intestinal juice,’ which operates on the starch of the food as it passes along the intestinal canal. This being the case, we should, in exercising our privilege as cooking animals, be able to assist the digestive functions of the saliva, the pancreatic and intestinal secretions, just as we help our teeth by the flour mill, and the means of doing this is offered by the diastase of malt.