Food and feeding / by Sir Henry Thompson. With an appendix.

  • Thompson, Henry, Sir, bart., 1820-1904.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Food and feeding / by Sir Henry Thompson. With an appendix. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    the products are very different, containing largely fat, with less albumen and fibrin, and much less water; and the pig owes his existence in great measure to the facility with which he produces fat meat for human food, such fat being of special value to use in combina- tion with other foods which contain almost none of it. Water and We will next examine another great food staple, a bread typical example from the vegetable kingdom, because familiar to all and extensively used, viz., fresh wheaten bread. In one hundred parts of this forty are water, fifty are starch, about eight consist of the nitrogenous principle corresponding to the albuminoid or flesh-forming elements in flesh, and there is but a fraction of fatty matter, the remainder being salts, &c. Now let us compare with these the constituent elements of fish. There is a closer resemblance, at first sight, perhaps, than many would expect to find. Notwithstanding that the fish is an inhabitant of water, and cannot live out of it, the proportion of that element in the animal’s structure exceeds only by a small amount the proportion which is present in laud animals. In other words, the solid constituents of fish as a class, and there are important exceptions here and there, arc but little less in weight than those of land animals already described. Water and hundred pounds of fish without bone, from solids in gevcnty-fivo to eighty-five are water, or rather more than three-quarters of the whole; leaving, say, about twenty pounds of solids as a mean estimate. Of these, about twelve to eighteen pounds arc nitro- genous compounds. The most important, or flesh-