Many writers upon the subject of dietetics are very laudatory of wheat and other cereal foods. Dr Tibbles, indeed, in his “Food and Hygiene,” p. 229, says that “so large a part do they fulfil in domestic preparations that it is almost safe to say that if the entire crop of cereals failed for one year nearly 90 per cent. of the inhabitants of the earth would die”! This might be true in a certain sense, for there would be no article of food to take the place of the cereals destroyed; but if nuts and fruits had been cultivated instead, it would be found that all the cereals could be dispensed with easily enough, and that none of the inhabitants would die; but, on the contrary, that they would retain a high degree of health—far higher than they now possess. If the whole wheat, containing all the grain—the nutritious gluten as well as the (comparatively speaking) innutritious starch—were supplied to the body, there would be far less objection to the use of grains and cereals; but as a matter of fact, this is rarely the case, and only health-reformers insist upon having bread made of whole wheat flour or gluten bread. The majority eat bread made of white, “superfine” flour—flour totally divested of its nutritious elements. Such flour contains none of the valuable salts which the whole grain contains; it is devoid of the proteid matter; it is constipating, and in other ways objectionable. And a practical proof of the correctness of this position is afforded by the fact that dogs, fed by Magendie upon superfine white flour, _all died_; while those dogs which were fed upon whole-wheat flour lived and retained their health. Such an experiment is worth any amount of theorising, for or against. Dr S. Rowbatham, writing some years ago on this subject, said: