This will be aided by the illustrations afforded of processes of
draining, ventilation, etc.
Man's health rests in that of his stomach. The food question is a
concern of the physician as well as of the publicist. The race began
life on a vegetable diet, and to that it reverts when compelled by
enfeebled digestion or by the increasing difficulty of providing animal
food for a dense population. But it likes flesh when able to assimilate
it or to procure it, and demands at least the compromise of fish. Hence,
the revived attention to fish-breeding, an art wellnigh forgotten since
the Reformation emptied the carp-ponds of the monks. Maryland, New York
and other States illustrate this device for enhancing the food-supply,
and the aquaria at Agricultural Hall, containing twelve or fifteen
thousand gallons of salt and fresh water, present a congress of the
leaders, gastronomically speaking, of the finny people. The shad remains
not only to be naturalized in Europe, but to be reintroduced to the
water-side dwellers above tide, who once met him regularly at table. He
is joined by delegates from the mountain, the great lakes and the
Pacific coast in the trout, the salmon and the whitefish, and by that
quiet, silent and slow-going cousin of the fraternity, the oyster, most
valuable of all, as possessors of those qualities not unfrequently are.
Europe does not dream, and we ourselves do not realize until we come
carefully to think of it, what the oyster does for us.
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