Materials at man's command for food from the vegetable kingdom - Seeds cultivated becoming grain, or cereal foods, as wheat and its derivatives, flour, wheaten bread - Oats and oatmeal - Maize and Indian corn meal, polenta - Rice - Legumes : haricots and lentils, etc. - Potato - Roots, the carrot, etc., arrowroot - Fatty matters from seeds, nuts, etc. - Green vegetables - Gourds - Fungi - Fruits and bananas - Analyses of their composition, showing comparative amounts of proteids, carbo-hydrates, fats, salts, and water - Sugar - Tea, coffee, and cacao - Common salt - Importance of perfect mastication of food by the teeth in relation to digestion explained and insisted upon.

It will be interesting now to take a general but brief survey of the vast range of materials which civilized man has at his command for the purpose of food: the foregoing remarks on the chemical constituents of food and their relation to the needs of the human body having been intended to aid us in further appreciating the value of different kinds.

Commencing with the vegetable kingdom, the earliest tribes of man, during long ages, as already seen, obtained much of their sustenance from seeds, herbs, roots, and fruits, in addition to their gains by hunting and fishing. As the art of cultivating the first-named was acquired, the cereals appeared as improvements on the seed-bearing grasses, and now conspicuously take the first place, as containing nearly all the elements necessary to life, and being therefore the most largely consumed. Wheat and its congeners, which rank highest in quality, had been distinguished, in the form of bread, as "the staff of life," long before the physiological demonstration of the fact had been attained. Wheat, oats, rye and barley, maize and rice, are the chief members of this group, wheat containing most of the nitrogenous or flesh-forming material, besides abundance of starch, a very small amount of fat, together with sufficient saline and mineral elements.

The resources of man in relation to food.