this place. Conjure her, and she will heed
you."

John Hanbury left her, and, full of ardour,
flew to carry out his new mission.

DRY MEAT.

HENRY THE FOURTH of France hoped for a
time when everyone of his subjects should have
a fowl in the pot. The time ought to be near
when every Englishman who can light a fire
and keep a gridiron shall have also a steak to
broil. We are finding our way slowly to the
art of victualling a nation, but it has not yet
been mastered. The fishmonger is not yet half
the man he is to become when we all show
practically that we know the worth of fish as a
cheap, nourishing, and palatable article of food,
when we keep the fishmonger's wits alive, and
get from him plenty of good victual at other
than fancy prices. And then the butcher.
Why, his business is only in its first rude
embryo state. He is a hand to mouth trader,
who cuts animals up and makes haste to sell the
pieces. If the trade minds its own interests
and seizes its own opportunities, they who come
after us will hear of the wealth of merchant
butchers, exporters of rump-steaks, and
importers of meat for the millions to whom meat
now is a scarce luxury. Do they mean to give
up their chance to the grocers and drysalters, and
to go on doing nothing but kill and cut up for
those who can pay ninepence or tenpence a pound
to get one only of many sorts of meat? Is there
no guild of butchers able and ready to diffuse
among its members the new spirit of enterprise,
and dignify their calling by the introduction of a
great system of traffic with all corners of the
globe, by making it beneficent as a dispenser of
new health and strength throughout the country?

A right knowledge of how meat should be
used is now coming upon us as one of the
results of chemical research that tells us what
meat is. It, as we all know in a general way,
is similarly constituted flesh of animals, that
when put into the stomach is converted by the
chemistry of life first into the blood, and from
that into the flesh and life of man. Whatever
is in the flesh we are made of, must be in
the vegetables or the flesh we eat to secure the
continued renovation that is one of the
conditions of our life. If any ingredient of the
meat be taken out of it, by so much the less is
it able to nourish and maintain health. Good
fresh killed meat is, therefore, and will always
be, the best food of its kind. But it is quite
possible to preserve meat so that none of its
constituent parts shall be lost from it except
the water, which, in the original state, forms
three-fourths of its substance, and can easily be
added again after its removal.

Not, indeed, that the meat is so preserved by
the process of pickling or curing hitherto used
in the storage of meat for the army and navy.
Quite the contrary. Let us see how that matter
stands. In the first place, what, besides the
three parts in four of water, are the materials of
flesh that the body requires from the meat that
is to make flesh?

There is albumen— the same substance that
forms white of egg— in the proportion of from
fourteen parts in a hundred in a young and
tender animal, to two parts in a hundred in an.
old and tough one. This constituent of meat lies
dissolved in the juice that surrounds and bathes
its fibres. It is the starting-point of the whole
construction of an animal, an absolute essential
of growth and development. Young meat is
tender when cooked, especially if plunged at
first into boiling water, or put close to the fire
before roasting, because there is albumen enough
to coagulate well about the fibres, and prevent
them from shrinking and hardening as cooking
proceeds. Old meat is tough because there is
not albumen enough to shield and support the
fibres against the effect of heat, so that they do
contract and harden.

The fibres themselves are of fibrin, of which
fresh meat contains seventeen or eighteen parts
in a hundred.

Besides the water, the albumen, and the
fibrine, meat contains constituents essential
to its nutritive power, though so small in
quantity that in a ten-pound leg of mutton
there are but about three ounces of all of them.
They are, phosphoric acid in different chemical
forms, found both in meat and in bread, a
necessary constituent of the digestive fluid, and
of the flesh juice of every animal. It is supposed
for one thing, that as the minute blood-vessels
run with coats exquisitely thin through the
uttermost parts of the flesh, and, although
porous as blotting-paper, yet, under healthy
conditions, never leak, this mixture of the fluid
within the minute vessels with the fluid without
is prevented by an electrical opposition set up
between the alkaline blood and the muscle juice,
which is acid. Experiment justifies this opinion,
and it is probable that when the withdrawal
of phosphoric acid from the food has drawn
the acid from the muscle juice, the electrical
opposition no longer exists powerfully enough
to prevent enudation. The blood then filters
out, causing such patches on the skin, and
bleeding at the gums, as are among the marks
of scurvy. The phosphoric acid is found also
to be especially essential to the healthy action
of the brain and nervous system.

Another constituent of meat is lactic acid, or
the acid of milk, which is a constituent of the
digestive fluid, and is used in respiration. There
are also potash, salts, and other crystallisable
constituents. Of gelatine— meat jelly— although
contained largely in bone and tendon, flesh
contains very little. In beef the proportion is
hardly more than one part in two hundred.
Jelly, therefore, however nice it may seem, is
not food. Indeed, if taken in place of food, it is
rather injurious than wholesome.

Now, just apply this knowledge of what meat
is to the old-world method of what is called
"preserving" meat hitherto used for our sailors.

The flesh is rubbed and sprinkled with dry