SECTION FIRST.
DEFINITIONS.
WHAT is understood by aliments?
POPULAR ANSWER. All that nourishes us.
SCIENTIFIC ANSWER. By aliments are understood the substances which, when submitted to the stomach, may be assimulated by digestion, and repair the losses which the human body is subjected to in life.
The distinctive quality of an aliment, therefore, is its liability to animal assimulation.
ANALYSIS.
The animal and vegetable kingdoms are those which until now have furnished food to the human race.
Since analytical chemistry has become a certain science, much progress has been made into the double nature of the elements of which our body is composed, and of the substances which nature appears to have intended to repair their losses.
These studies had a great analogy, for man is to a great degree composed both of the substances on which animals feed, and was also forced to look in the vegetable kingdom for affinities susceptible of animalization.