have described above. When the solid part of the entertainment has been despatched, they put up their knives after wiping them on their clothes, and then proceed to drink the broth in their wooden cups. If they have any millet, they like to throw a little into the broth as they drink it. The millet gets softened a little as the cup is rapidly replenished, but no further cooking is necessary. When the broth is finished, they put clean water into the taga with a handful or two of brick tea, and go to sleep while it is boiling. The tea so made has of course a greasy appearance, and this practice of cooking everything in the same pot has probably given rise to the belief that they boil mutton and tea together, eating the leaves of the tea with the mutton. There may be Tartar tribes who do this, but the Khalkas Mongols certainly do not. The tea leaves, or rather stalks,--for their bricks are made up of tea dust and timber,--are always thrown away. It is necessary to boil the tea to get anything out of it at all, and it is of course bitter and ill flavoured. I have drunk it when hard up; and when it is well diluted with milk it is not unpalatable, when you can get nothing else. The Mongol tastes no doubt seem to us very unrefined, but they are natural. The great esteem in which they hold the fat as compared with the lean of mutton, is a plain expression of the direction in which their ordinary regimen is defective. It is well known that fat and farinaceous foods ultimately fulfil the same purposes in the human economy; they mutually compensate, and one or other is absolutely necessary. We thus find fat and oils eagerly sought after, wherever, as among the Mongols and Esquimaux, the cultivation of cereals is forbidden by soil and climate. The value of a scale of diet does not, as might at first sight be supposed, consist in the prominence of any one article, but depends on the different ingredients which are necessary to sustain health, being duly proportioned; and wherever the food of a people is necessarily composed of one substance almost exclusively, the natural appetite will always mark out as delicacies those which are deficient. It is to this want of due proportion in the elements of diet that we must attribute the comparative muscular weakness of the Mongols, in spite of the abundant supply of mutton and the bracing air of the desert. The coolies of China and Japan greatly excel them in feats of strength, and in power of endurance, because the rice on which they feed contains a more varied proportion of the elements that nourish life, the poor quality of the fare being compensated by the incredible quantities which they consume.