If, in a flesh diet, animal albumins are always consumed nearly pure (lean meat containing hardly anything but albumin, besides a little fat, and an inferior quantity of glycogen) vegetable albumin is always, on the contrary, mixed with a number of other substances. This is doubtless one of the reasons which causes the digestibility of vegetable albumins to vary, the foreign nutritive matters being able to bring about, under certain circumstances, and in cases of superabundant ingestions, a real albuminous "saving" in the newest sense of the word. Besides, a prejudicial question makes the debate almost vain. When it was admitted by such physiologists as Voit, Rubner and their school that from 140 to 150 grammes of albumin in the minimum were daily necessaries in the human diet, a variation of a few units in the digestive power presented some importance. Nowadays the real utility of albumins is differently appreciated. The need of them seems to have been singularly exaggerated; first lowered to about 75 gr. by A. Gautier, it has dropped successively with Lapicque, Chittenden, Landergreen, Morchoisne and Labbe, by virtue of considerations both ethnological and physiological, to 50 grs., 30 grs. and even to 25 or 20 grammes. The "nutritive relation"--that is to say, the yield from albuminoid matters to the total nutritive matters of diet--is thus brought down from 1/3 its primitive value to 1/15 or 1/20 at most. It follows that the slight inferiority found in the digestive powers of vegetable albumin appears unimportant. It is sufficient to add 2 or 3 more grammes of albumin to a ration already superabundant of from 40 to 50 grammes of vegetable proteins to bring back a complete equilibrium in the use of vegetable and animal varieties. The theoretical inferiority of vegetable albumin thus almost completely disappears. H. LABBE. (_To be continued._) * * * * * If your system has become clogged, go slow--and fast. ODE TO THE WEST WIND. O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill Wild Spirit which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!