“As we enjoyed the admirable omelet which followed—eight ounces: one of proteid, one of fat, one-half ounce of carbo-hydrate; cost ten cents for four—the professor informed me that the nutritive value of food is measured by the heat it gives off in combustion, the unit of computation being the calorie, or the amount of heat which would raise one pound of water four degrees Fahrenheit. Protein and carbo-hydrate yield eighteen hundred to the pound, fats about four thousand. The necessary number of calories per day for a professional man is somewhere between the thirty-two hundred averaged by American and the thirty-three hundred averaged by Japanese university professors. The standard is placed at twenty-seven hundred by the special agent in charge of the United States Department of Agriculture’s investigations in nutrition. Hard muscular labor requires half as much again. These figures are the result of measurements, by means of a so-called respiratory calorimeter, of the entire receipts and expenditures of the human body, under varying conditions and for periods of from three to twelve days. These and similar experiments are described in bulletins published and distributed without charge by the Department of Agriculture. Recent experiments by other investigators make the ideal number of calories considerably less.
“Toasted rolls and drip coffee ended our meal; the former weighed four ounces, two-thirds carbo-hydrate, the remainder equally proteid and fat; the ingredients costing only two cents, or as much as the butter used on them. Throughout, of course, no estimate was made of the cost of labor, an element which, together with rent or interest on equipment, usually more than equals the cost of food. Fuel costs, approximately, one-tenth of this amount.
“Coffee was assigned no nutritive value in the tabular statement of our breakfast that Portia worked out and brought me some days later. But as a mild stimulant, it does more good than harm, very much less harm than tea, which, when not freshly made, contains chemicals difficult of digestion. The coffee we four enjoyed cost approximately three cents.
“When Portia told me that she was also to give a luncheon, with soup, entrée, salad, and a sweet, I fear that I was too precipitate in my commendation of her work, my prophecies for her future, and in implying my willingness again to serve the cause of science. I tried my best, however, to be discreet, for I am very anxious to be invited again, and I was rather pleased at my adroitness in presenting her with an individually bound volume of Ruskin, with the red silk marker at that page of ‘The Ethics of the Dust’ which says of cooking:
“‘It means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Calypso and of Helen and of Rebekah and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices; and of all that is healing and sweet in fields and groves, and savory in meats; it means carefulness and inventiveness and watchfulness and willingness and readiness of appliance; it means the economy of your great-grandmothers and the science of modern chemists; it means English thoroughness and French art and Arabian hospitality; and it means, in fine, that you are to be perfectly and always “ladies”—“loaf-givers;” and, as you are to see, imperatively, that everybody has something pretty to put on, so you are to see, yet more imperatively, that everybody has something nice to eat.’”
XVII
Summer Science
“MY young friend, Portia,” said Professor Maturin, “was plainly dubious when I suggested making a week-end visit to the scientific colony where she planned to spend the summer doing research work in biology. She did not believe that I would be interested in observing a hundred college professors and students listening to lectures and looking through microscopes. She implied that occasional visitors were felt, by their holiday moods, somewhat to distract the attention of the serious workers. And, finally, she suggested that I was perhaps temperamentally unsuited to lead the very simple life that prevailed, the place being as unlike as possible to the typical summer resort. However, when I pleaded my sympathetic interest in all things human, modestly called attention to my reputation for discretion, and gently reminded her that I had proved an acceptable and even welcome guest among the peace agitators of Lake Placid, the literati of Onteora, and the artists of Cornish, she ceased to protest. I might do as I liked; she, of course, would be glad to see me.
“So it was that I found myself, one calm Saturday evening, en route for her ‘Marine Biological Laboratory.’ During my sail along the Sound I found myself amusedly wondering whether Portia’s professors would prove to be anything like the important mate who gave so many more and so much louder orders than were necessary, in warping the boat from the dock. I was pleased to find them rather more like the lights that later appeared along the shore—some clear and steady, some brilliant but intermittent, others a trifle spectacular in coloring, all plainly enjoying a comfortable sense of their importance to the community; but all of them interesting, and some performing services really indispensable to human progress.
“The realization of high thinking and, presumably, plain living began with a six o’clock landing next morning and the writer’s earliest breakfast in years, watching, meanwhile, coming events cast their shadows before in the person of a slender spectacled gentleman in blue, who slowly consumed one roll and a cup of frequently diluted coffee, while he rapidly assimilated the contents of a thin, black, scientific-looking volume with round corners and red edges.
“Within an hour, on a smaller steamer, we sighted the red brick, yellow shingle, and green slate buildings of a station of the United States Fish Commission. It was because of this station, devoted to everything that affects our fisheries, and of its especial facilities for collecting and preserving marine life, that a group of college scientists established the biological laboratory by its side, some twenty years ago. Their leader was still the director, and although most of the administrative details were now delegated to younger men, he was still regularly in residence, in a cottage erected by his appreciative colleagues to replace one destroyed by fire, and surrounded by hundreds of carefully reared pigeons, which for years he had made the basis of minute studies in heredity, with the aid of two Japanese artists, who painstakingly recorded the contour and coloring of every peculiar bird.