[Verse: "I clothed thee also with broidered work, and shod thee with badgers' skin, and I girded thee about with fine linen, and I covered thee with silk."--EZEKIEL XVI.] From the Sacred writings we learn that unleavened bread was common in the days of Abraham. In the earlier periods of our own history, people had no other method of making bread than by roasting corn, and beating it in mortars, then wetting it into a kind of coarse cake. In 1596, rye bread and oatmeal formed a considerable part of the diet of servants, even in great families. In the time of Charles the First, barley bread was the chief food of the people. In many parts of England it was more the custom to make bread at home than at present. In 1804, there was not a single public baker in Manchester. In France, when the use of yeast was first introduced, it was deemed by the faculty of medicine to be so injurious to health that its use was prohibited under the severest penalties. Herault says that, during the siege of Paris by Henry the Fourth, a famine raged, and bread sold at a crown a pound. When this was consumed, the dried bones from the charnel house of the Holy Innocents were exhumed, and a kind of bread made therefrom. Bread-street, in London, was once a bread market. From the year 1266, it had been customary to regulate by law the price of bread in proportion to the price of wheat or flour at the time. This was called the assize of bread; but, in 1815, it was abolished. In the year 272 there was a famine in Britain so severe that people ate the bark of trees; forty thousand persons perished by famine in England in 310! In the year 450 there was a famine in Italy so dreadful that people ate their own children. A famine, commencing in England, Wales, and Scotland, in 954, lasted four years. A famine in England and France, in 1193, led to a pestilential fever, which lasted until 1195. In 1315 there was again a dreadful famine in England, during which people devoured the flesh of horses, dogs, cats, and vermin! In the year 1775, 16,000 people died of famine in the Cape de Verds. These are only a few of the remarkable famines that have occurred in the course of history. Let us thank God that we live in times of abundance, when improved cultivation, the pursuit of industry, and the settlement of the laws, render such a calamity as a famine almost an impossibility. 1199. _What is cotton?_ Cotton is a species of vegetable wool, produced by the cotton shrub, called, botanically, _Gossypium herbaceum_, of which there are numerous varieties. It grows naturally in Asia, Africa, and America, and is cultivated largely for purposes of commerce.