W. Mattieu Williams

“ Most philosophical thinkers will, I believe, agree with me in concluding that a sound reply to it will solve the great mystery of the everlasting radiations of our sun and all the other suns of the universe. So long as we regard these suns as the sources of continually expended forces of light and heat, their everlasting and unabated renewal becomes a mystery utterly inscrutable to the human intellect, since the creation of new force, or any addition to the total forces of the universe, is as inconceivable to us as any addition to the total matter of the universe. ”

“ To anybody who has any knowledge of the chemistry of wine, nothing can be more ludicrous than the antics of the pretending connoisseur of wine who holds his glass up to the light, shuts one eye (even at the stage before double vision [275] commences) , and admires the brilliancy of the liquid, this very brilliancy being, in nineteen samples out of twenty, the evidence of adulteration, cookery, or sophistication of some kind. Genuine wine made from pure grape-juice without chemical manipulation is a liquid that is never reliably clear, for the reasons above stated. ”

“ If nothing more than this were done, and such simple dough were baked, the starch-granules would be duly broken up and hydrated, the gluten also hydrated, but, at the same time, the particles of flour would be so cemented together as to form a mass so hard and tough when baked that no ordinary human teeth could crush it. Among all our modern triumphs of applied science none can be named that is more refined and elegant than the old device by which this difficulty is overcome in the every-day business of making bread. ”

“ We have ransacked hundreds of soils replete with the fossil roots of trees, have dug out hundreds of erect trunks and stumps which stood in the position in which they grew, have broken up myriads of cubic feet of fuel still retaining its vegetable structure, and, after all, we continue almost as much in the dark respecting the invertebrate air-breathers of this epoch, as if the coal had been thrown down in mid-ocean. ”

“ During the forty years that have elapsed since my first sojourn in Italy, my sympathies are continually lacerated when I contemplate the melancholy spectacle of human beings eating thin soup without any grated cheese. ”

“ Tell one of the idolaters that his household god is wasteful and extravagant, that five-sixths of the heat from his coal goes up the chimney, and he replies, “I don’t care if it does; I can afford to pay for it. I like to see the fire, and have the right to waste what is my own.” Tell him that healthful ventilation is impossible while the lower part of a room opens widely into a heated shaft, that forces currents of cold air through doors and window leakages, which unite to form a perpetual chilbrain stratum on the floor, and leaves all above the mantel-piece comparatively stagnant. ”

“ I may now venture to state my own view of a somewhat obscure subject, viz., the difference between the roasting or grilling and the stewing of meat. It appears to me that, with the exception of the superficial "browning," it consists simply in the difference between the cooking media; that a grilled steak or chop or a roasted joint is meat that has been stewed in its own juices instead of stewed in water; that in both cases the changes taking place in the solid parts of the meat are the same in kind, provided always that the roasting or grilling is properly performed. ”

“ The question that now naturally arises is whether modern science can show us that anything more can be done in the preparation of vegetable tissue than the mere softening in boiling water. I have already said that the practice of using the digestive apparatus of sheep, oxen, &c., for the preparation of our food is merely a transitory barbarism, to be ultimately superseded by scientific cookery, by preparing vegetables in such a manner that they shall be as easily digested as the prepared grass we call beef and mutton. ”

“ Few sights are more melancholy than the contemplation of a party of English fire-worshipers seated in a semicircle round the family fetish on a keen frosty day. They huddle together, roast their knees, and grill their faces, in order to escape the chilling blast that is brought in from all the chinks of leaky doors and windows by the very agent they employ, at so much cost, for the purpose of keeping the cold away. ”

“ It clearly points out two well-marked natural divisions of such education: education or training in the movements to be made, and education in a knowledge of the consequences of such movements—i. e., in a knowledge of the forces of Nature which actually do the work when man has suitably arranged the materials.
The education ordinarily given to apprentices in the workshop, or the field, or the studio—or, as relating to my present subject, the kitchen—is the first of these; the second, and equally necessary, being simply and purely the teaching of physical science as applied to the arts. ”

“ The solid earth continually shaken by the approaching tread of hideous giants—moving mountains—that crush out precious lives at every footstep, an occasional draught of the blood of these monsters, stolen at life-risk, affording but poor compensation for such fatal persecution. ”

“ Before giving my answer to this question I must explain the chemical constitution of fat. It is a compound of a very weak base with very weak acids. The basic substance is glycerine, the acids (not sour at all, but so named because they combine with bases as the actually sour acids do) are stearic acid, palmitic acid, oleic acid, &c., and bear the general name of ‘fatty acids.’ They are solid or liquid, according to temperature. When solid they are pearly crystalline substances, when fused they are oily liquids. ”

“ WHAT a horrible place must this world appear when regarded according to our ideas from an insect's point of view! The air infested with huge flying hungry dragons, whose gaping and snapping mouths are ever intent upon swallowing the innocent creatures for whom, according to the insect, if he were like us, a properly constructed world ought to be exclusively adapted. ”

“ My object is not to discuss the personal question whether book-making and dredging afford better or worse training for experimental inquiry than the marvelously exact and exquisitely delicate manipulations of the modern observatory and laboratory, but to protest against this attempt to stop the progress of investigation, to damage the true interests of science and the cause of truth, by throwing low libellous mud upon any and everybody who steps at all aside from the beaten paths of ordinary investigation. ”

“ Here, in this densely-populated country, where we import so much of our food, cheese demands our most profound attention. The difficulties and cost of importing all kinds of meat, fish, and poultry are great, while cheese may be cheaply and deliberately brought to us from any part of the world where cows or goats can be fed, and it can be stored more readily and kept longer than other kinds of animal food. All that is required to render it, next to bread, the staple food of Britons is scientific cookery. ”

“ Six months of compulsory wood and peat fuel, with total stoppage of iron supplies, would convince the people of these islands that waste of coal is even more sinful than waste of bread,—would lead us to reflect on the fact that our stock of coal is a definite and limited quantity that was placed in the present storehouse long before human beings came upon the earth; that every ton of coal that is wasted is lost for ever, and cannot be replaced by any human effort, while bread is a product of human industry, and its waste may be replaced by additional human labor ”

“ In other words, by the consumption of a certain quantity of tea, the health and strength of the body will be maintained in an equal degree upon a smaller quantity of ordinary food. Tea, therefore, saves food—stands to a certain extent in the place of food—while, at the same time, it soothes the body and enlivens the mind.’
He proceeds to say that ‘in the old and infirm it serves also another purpose. In the life of most persons a period arrives when the stomach no longer digests enough of the ordinary elements of food to make up for the natural daily waste of the bodily substance. ”

“ It supposes nothing whatever to exist but the known facts of the laboratory—the familiar materials of the earth and its atmosphere. It is shown that these materials and the forces residing within them must of necessity produce a sun, and manifest eternally all the observed solar phenomena, provided only they are aggregated in the quantities which our own central luminary presents, and are surrounded by attendant planets, such as his. Nothing is assumed or taken for granted beyond the simple fundamental hypothesis that the laws of nature are uniform throughout the universe. ”

“ Surely the time has arrived for the full reconsideration of this fundamental question of whether the universe is filled with atmospheric matter or is the vacuum of the molecular mathematicians plus the imaginary “ether,” which has been invented by its mathematical creators only to extricate them from the absurd dilemma into which they are plunged when they attempt to explain the transmission of light and heat by undulations traveling through space containing nothing to undulate. ”

“ I must confess that my faith in the logical acumen of mathematicians has been rudely shaken by the manner in which eminent astronomers have described the umbra or nucleus of the sun-spots as the solid body of the sun seen through his luminous atmosphere, and the solid surface of Jupiter seen through his belts, and have discussed the habitability of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune always on the assumption of their solidity, while the specific-gravity of all of these renders this surface solidity a demonstrable physical impossibility. ”

“ I may further add that I am animated by a deadly hatred of our barbarous practice of wasting precious coal by burning it in iron fire-baskets half buried in holes within brick walls, and under shafts that carry 80 or 90 per cent of its heat to the clouds; that pollute the atmosphere of our towns, and make all their architecture hideous; that render scientific and efficient ventilation of our houses impossible ”

“ The moral forces exerted by the individual human molecules are the true components which determine the resulting force and direction of national progress. It is the industry and skill of our workmen, the self-denial, the enterprise, and organizing ability of our capitalists, that has brought our coal so precociously to the surface and redirected for human advantage the buried energies of ancient sunbeams, while the fossil fuel of other lands has remained inert. ”

“ Many a disappointed dreamer, finding that his theory of the universe has not been accepted, and that the expected honors have not been showered upon him, has violently attacked the whole scientific community as a contemptible gang of low-minded mechanical plodders, void of imagination, blind to all poetic aspirations, and incapable of any grand and comprehensive flight of intellect. ”