it is just the profound reasons for this traditional practice that we are trying to discover.
The problem of alimentation may be looked at in a thousand ways. It is culinary, no doubt, and gastronomic; but it is also economical and social, agricultural, fiscal, hygienic, medical, and even moral. But first and foremost, it is physiological. It comprises and assumes the knowledge of the general composition of foods, of their transformations in the digestive apparatus, and their comparative utility in the maintenance and the sound functional activity of the organism. To this first group of subjects for our discussion are attached others relating to the effects of inanition, of insufficient alimentation, and of over-feeding. And in order to throw light on all these aspects of the problem of alimentation, we have to lay bare the most intimate and delicate reactions by which the organism is maintained and recruited, and, in the words of a celebrated physiologist, "to penetrate into the kitchen of vital phenomena." And here neither Apicius, nor Brillat-Savarin, nor Berchoux, nor the moralists, nor the economists are of any use to us as guides. We must appeal to the scientists, who, following the example of Lavoisier, Berzelius, Regnault, and Liebig, have applied to the study of living beings the resources of general science, and have thus founded chemical biology.
This branch of science developed considerably in the second half of the nineteenth century. It has now its methods, its technique, its chairs at the universities, its laboratories, and its literature. It has particularly applied itself to the study of the "material changes" or the metabolism of living beings, and with that object in view it has done two things In the first
