We have learned that there is a stomachic digestion and an intestinal digestion, the former principally for meats, or that class which are now called nitrogenous foods, while the latter is confined generally to starches and fats. This physiological fact suggested the idea of feeding dyspeptics only on such food as is not acted upon in the stomach, but passes beyond that cavity to become digested in the small intestines, giving the stomach a rest as it were so that it may recuperate and gain strength while the system is being fed by farinaceous aliments. While a superficial glance justified such a procedure, a moment’s reflection proves it to be a delusion, and for this reason, that there will be an unavoidable irritation of the stomach which the journey of the farinaceous material occasions in its passage through the stomach, and the insufficient nutritive value of a simple non-nitrogenous diet causes a rapid loss of tissue and bodily strength; hence this course proved itself impracticable and was abandoned. Then again the experiment was tried of putting a certain class of dyspeptics on a purely meat diet; this had one fault common with the former plan; it was also too one-sided, and the system suffered for want of fat and starch, and secondly peptones were not always formed in the stomach from a deficiency of the gastric juice or an impairment of its quality, so that this method was also abandoned. Fats belong to the starches and sugars as heat producers; they are insoluble in water, and by boiling them in caustic alkali they are decomposed into soap and glycerine. In the cavity of the stomach fats remain unaltered; the heat of the stomach may melt or liquefy them, but in no other way are they changed. They are also digested, like the starches, in the small intestine by the action of the pancreatic juice which possesses the remarkable property when brought in contact with fatty or oily matter at the temperature of the body of emulsifying it, and of converting the fats into a milky, white, opaque looking fluid, by a minute subdivision of the oily particles. This emulsion of the fatty and other substances of the food is termed chyle, and as such, the fatty substances are ready for absorption by the absorbents of the intestinal tract. Experience teaches that a deficiency of fat causes scrofulous diseases, and this class of patients have generally a repugnance for fat; this is another illustration of the unreliability of patients to choose their own food. Professor John H. Bennet first pointed out the usefulness of cod liver oil in consumption and other scrofulous diseases, and directed attention to the value of fat in the nutrition of the body.