There are really but two ways of arranging the day’s meals; the one, the more rational, we may call the French way; the other, the less rational, we may call the English labourer’s way. The first arrangement is carried out by nearly every nation except ourselves. It consists in a very light breakfast, a fair meal after noon, and the chief meal in the evening. The second arrangement consists of a fair breakfast, the chief meal at about one o’clock, and a small meal in the evening. And then there is our own, the irrational method of feeding—a big breakfast, a scrap for lunch, and the dinner in the evening. But if this division of meals is not physiologically correct, why do we adhere to it? The answer to this is that we choose the least harmful of several very wrong methods. The man in the middle class in England does not apportion out for himself any definite time for meals; if he did not dine in the evening, he would never properly digest any meal. Take a busy City man, for instance. He arranges his time in such a manner that he swallows down his last teaspoonful of tea at breakfast about a quarter of a second before he runs to catch his train. If it were not that he has to keep still while in the train, he would never digest his meal at all. And then he rushes out of his office to snatch a bit of lunch between two items of business. He may play a game of chess over his lunch, but such a gross waste of time as sitting down for five minutes after his meal is never tolerated until he becomes a martyr to dyspepsia. But after dinner he does rest, because he has nothing else to do. His business for the day is over, and he digests his meal in peace. But with the working-classes the case is very different. They have certain hours given to them for their meals, during which time they are not allowed to work, and for such persons it is advisable to dine in the middle of the day. It would be of little good for us to describe the few advantages and overwhelming abuses of a sumptuous banquet, for, most fortunately for themselves, extremely few of our readers are ever likely to be present at one. Nor would it suit our purpose to describe a one-course dinner, so we will take the chief meal of a well-to-do man of the upper middle-class as the subject of our remarks. Here is the menu:— Tomato Soup. Turbot and Lobster Sauce. Mutton Cutlets and Tomatoes. Roast Ribs of Beef. Horse-radish. Spinach. Potatoes. Cabinet Pudding. Caviare on Toast. Coffee. We will first criticise the dinner as a whole and then dilate separately upon each item. In the first place the meal is much too long. Dinner should never last more than half an hour, whereas this meal will take a full hour at least.