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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/240

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

on the whole the best guide as to the kind and amount of food that is good for us. When he finds in nature a marked masculine and feminine type of being, of body and of mind, marked enough from birth, but diverging widely from the beginning of the physiological era of adolescence, each type tending toward a different ideal, and attaining this at the end of that period; and, recognizing these facts of nature, he finds it most difficult to admit that the same type of education should prevail in this momentous era, or that the same standard and ideal of a completed education should be striven after for the two sexes. And, when he finds that the great geniuses of literature have created these types of young women as different from the masculine type as the Apollo Belvedere is unlike the Venus de’ Medici, he can not but become strongly persuaded that his deductions from physiological facts are true, and that they have been always instinctively recognized by the wisest of mankind. If it can be shown that the present tendency to over-educate the female sex in book-learning during adolescence, and the mental work, confinement, etc., that this implies tend to impair perfect health, to interfere with Nature's lines of feminine development, to exhaust energy that is needed for other purposes, and to diminish the chances of the permanence of the race, then it is time that the physiological view in regard to education were put in a plain way to the professional educator and to the parent.

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY.

By W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS.

XVIII.

I FIND that Sir Henry Thompson, in a lecture delivered at the Fisheries Exhibition, and now reprinted, has invaded my subject, and has done this so well that I shall retaliate by annexing his suggestion, which is that fish should be roasted. He says that this mode of cooking fish should be general, since it is applicable to all varieties. I fully agree with him, but go a little further in the same direction by including, not only roasting in a Dutch or American oven before the fire, but also in the side-ovens of kitcheners and in gas-ovens, which, when used as I have explained, are roasters, i. e., they cook by radiation, without any of the drying anticipated by Sir Henry.

The practical housewife will probably say that this is not new, seeing that people who know what is good have long been in the habit of enjoying mackerel and haddocks (especially Dublin Bay haddocks) stuffed and baked, and cods' heads similarly treated. The Jews do something of the kind with halibut's head, which they prize as the