Report of lectures on the natural history of plants yielding food : with incidental remarks on the functions and disorders of the digestive organs / delivered by Edwin Lankester.

  • Lankester, Edwin, 1814-1874.
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of lectures on the natural history of plants yielding food : with incidental remarks on the functions and disorders of the digestive organs / delivered by Edwin Lankester. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    Chinese. He was not aware of these nests being brought to England, but swallow nest soup was sometimes seen as a curiosity. He now came to the second group of plants,—those which con- tain starch in combination with considerable quantities of protein; and these plants must ever form a fundamental or basal portion of the food of mankind. They Kare distributed everywhere, and the great raw muterinl out of which mankind was built up, was found in these plants, which included wheat, barley, rye, maize, and millet. Wheat so extensively used as an article of food, was the produce of a plant called the Triiicum hybernum, belonging to the natural order Graminacetc, or grain-bearing plants, which, although so apparently insignificant as to contain all the common weeds and grasses that proved such pests in our gardens, also included wheat, barley, oats, rye, millet, maize, and the sugar-cane. We were lost in attempting to trace the origin of the use of wheat amogst mankind. It seems to have been used from time immemorial, and there is no question that the earliest records in the Bible refer to this form of wheat. He showed stalks in ear, of wheal, barley, and oats, and observed that the grain was merely the fi'uit of the plant. In preparing the grain for food, the pericarp or covering of the seed was separated in the form of bran, and all that was used was the interior, which was really the seed. Wheat was cultivated extensively throughout Europe and several other parts of the world, and formed the great basis of European food ; and the importance of attention to its cultivation had become much more apparent from the investigations of modern chemists. Wheat contained certain principles which we could sup])ly from without. Previously to our knowledge of this fact, we were in some difficulty as to the proper way to supply food to this plant, so as to obtain from it the greatest quantity of nutritious matter; but the investigations of chemists had led us to see what were really the elements of which wheat consists. The principal constituents of wheat are starch, gluten or fibrin (protein), and a certain number of inorganic consti- tuents, and these were found not to be unimportant in wlieat. Although we had starch maintaining the heat of the body, and protein building up its fabric, we had still these other ingredients hitherto regarded as unimportant; and one of these was phosphate of lime, of which the bones of animals were composed ; so that these particles in the wheat were taken into tiie sys:em to build up the bony fabric of the body : and had we not this small portion of phosphate of lime, our bones would grow soft, and would not be able to maintain the muscular fabric laid upon them. It had sometimes been supposed that we might introduce other salts of Jime into the body, and thus furnish phosphate of lime to the bones, and a short time since there was a curious illustration of this. Dr. Clarke, of Aberdeen, went up to London, to state before the various bodies intesested in the health of the metropolis, his mode of cleansing the Thames water, so generally used in London for drinking. This mode consisted in separating the salts of lime and various organic constituents, which entered into the water; but he was met by the objection, Why, if you take away the lime from the water of London, where will you find lime to build