[262] “Keep a man on brown bread and water, and he will live and enjoy good health; give him white bread and water only, and he will gradually sicken and die. The brown contains all the ingredients essential to the composition or nourishment of our bodies. Some of these are removed by the miller in his efforts to please the public. The loss by fermentation and refining taken together, is under-estimated at twenty-five per cent. 18,000,000 quarters of wheat are made into bread annually in England and Wales: the waste is, therefore, 4,500,000 quarters, or 3,357,000,000lbs. of bread, or eight ounces per day per man. This is nearly double the quantity of wheat usually imported; and amounts, at 50s. the quarter, to 11,250,000_l._ sterling.”--_Pamphlet on Unfermented Bread._ [263] “Some of our readers may, perhaps, smile at the idea that the poor require much instruction in this art. The first and greatest difficulty with them, they say, is, that they can get very little food to cook. This is too true; but it is equally true that the little food a poor family obtains is not made the best of; and that a greater variety of wholesome, better-flavoured, and more nourishing food may be procured by an improved system of cookery, and without any additional expense. In many cases indeed, the cost would be less than by the present defective method.”--_The Family Economist_, p. 10. [264] Humboldt has decided that for maize (Zea maize) the old continent is indebted to the new. If so, it would carry its own name, or receive a descriptive one. Tobacco we can trace as tobacco, or as “smoke” καχνὸς (_Tutun_). Potatoes by that name, or as “root apples:” not so maize. The Greeks call it Arabic Ἀραποσιτι. The Turks, Egyptian (_Missir Bogda_). On the Black Sea, it is _Cucuruzzi_. The Arabs of Egypt call it Doura Shamee, or Grain of Damascus. The Bulgarians call it _Callamboki_. Throughout the Indian archipelago it is known as _Sagung_. In one of the Egyptian tombs there is a figure holding a head of Indian corn; but this a learned writer will not admit, “because that grain was introduced into Europe from Virginia.” Is it the _ksob_ of Negroland? the _Droueu_ and _Beshna_ of various parts of north Africa?--See Egyptian Antiquities, Lib. Ent. Knowledge, vol. ii. p. 30; Wilkinson, vol. i. p. 397; Crawford’s Indian Archipelago, vol. i. p. 366; Bradford’s American Antiquities, p. 418; Carette’s Algeria, vol. ii. [265] Formerly every private soldier cooked in turn for his mess. In this respect, at all events, they preserved the temper and the tone of the heroic ages, where the chiefs did not disdain to use the spit. The revolution of February--the Labour Revolution--comes, and is followed by a new subdivision, the appointment of forty-nine cooks to every regiment.