Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 353, March 1845

The quantity of oatmeal allowed to the ploughman —as his sole food– is two pecks, or 17½ lbs. in a week, exactly 2½ lbs. a-day – or ¾ lb. for each meal – and yet it often happens that a hard-worked ploughman cannot consume the whole of this allowance. Speaking again of oatmeal porridge, Mr Stephens says, "there are few more wholesome meals than oatmeal porridge, or upon which a harder day's work can be wrought. Children of all ranks in Scotland are brought up on this diet, verifying the line of Burns,

"'The halesome parritch, chief of Scotia's food.'"

As southern prejudices have a tendency to make their way northward, and, in the face of old experience at home, are leading many to undervalue the oatmeal, on which we trust our peasantry will long rely as their staple food, it is interesting to find that, on this point, science has at length come to the aid of reason and experience. Chemistry has already told us many remarkable things in regard to the vegetable food we eat – that it contains, for example, a certain per centage of the actual fat and lean we consume in our beef, or mutton, or pork – and, therefore, that he who lives upon vegetable food may be as strong as the man who lives upon animal food, because both in reality feed upon the same things in a somewhat different form. Now it appears, from analysis, that wheaten flour contains on an average not more than ten per cent of actual dry beef – of that which forms the living muscle of the animal that feeds upon it – with three per cent of fat, and fifty of starch. And because of this chemical composition, our southern neighbours think wheaten flour the most nourishing, the most refined, and the most civilized of all food.

But Professor Johnston, in the recent edition of his Elements,28 tells us, that, from experiments made in the laboratory of the Agricultural Chemistry Association of Scotland, it turns out that oats are far richer in all the three things above named than the best wheat flour grown in any part of England – that they contain eighteen or twenty per cent of that which forms muscle, five to eight of fat, and sixty-five of starch. The account, therefore, between shelled oats (groats) and fine wheaten flour stands thus. One hundred pounds of each contain —

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1

Daguerreotype, &c.

2

Valerius Flaccus.

3

Cicero, in a well-known passage of his Ethics, speaks of trade as irredeemably base, if petty; but as not so absolutely felonious if wholesale. He gives a real merchant (one who is such in the English sense) leave to think himself a shade above small-beer.

4

"The astonishment of science." – Her medical attendants were Dr Percival, a well-known literary physician, who had been a correspondent of Condorcet, D'Alembert, &c., and Mr Charles White, a very distinguished surgeon. It was he who pronounced her head to be the finest in its structure and development of any that he had ever seen – an assertion which, to my own knowledge, he repeated in after years, and with enthusiasm. That he had some acquaintance with the subject may be presumed from this, that he wrote and published a work on the human skull, supported by many measurements which he had made of heads selected from all varieties of the human species. Meantime, as I would be loth that any trait of what might seem vanity should creep into this record, I will candidly admit that she died of hydrocephalus; and it has been often supposed that the premature expansion of the intellect in cases of that class, is altogether morbid – forced on, in fact, by the mere stimulation of the disease. I would, however, suggest, as a possibility, the very inverse order of relation between the disease and the intellectual manifestations. Not the disease may always have caused the preternatural growth of the intellect, but, on the contrary, this growth coming on spontaneously, and outrunning the capacities of the physical structure, may have caused the disease.

5

Amongst the oversights in the Paradise Lost, some of which have not yet been perceived, it is certainly one– that, by placing in such overpowering light of pathos the sublime sacrifice of Adam to his love for his frail companion, he has too much lowered the guilt of his disobedience to God. All that Milton can say afterwards, does not, and cannot, obscure the beauty of that action: reviewing it calmly, we condemn – but taking the impassioned station of Adam at the moment of temptation, we approve in our hearts. This was certainly an oversight; but it was one very difficult to redress. I remember, amongst the many exquisite thoughts of John Paul, (Richter,) one which strikes me as peculiarly touching upon this subject. He suggests – not as any grave theological comment, but as the wandering fancy of a poetic heart – that, had Adam conquered the anguish of separation as a pure sacrifice of obedience to God, his reward would have been the pardon and reconciliation of Eve, together with her restoration to innocence.

6

"I stood in unimaginable trance

And agony, which cannot be remember'd."

– Speech of Alhadra in Coleridge's Remorse.

7

Some readers will question the fact, and seek no reason. But did they ever suffer grief at any season of the year?

8

Φυγη μονου προς μονον. – Plotinus.

9

The thoughts referred to will be given in final notes; as at this point they seemed too much to interrupt the course of the narrative.

10

"Everlasting Jew!" —der ewige Jude– which is the common German expression for The Wandering Jew, and sublimer even than our own.

11

"I felt." – The reader must not forget, in reading this and other passages, that, though a child's feelings are spoken of, it is not the child who speaks. I decipher what the child only felt in cipher. And so far is this distinction or this explanation from pointing to any thing metaphysical or doubtful, that a man must be grossly unobservant who is not aware of what I am here noticing, not as a peculiarity of this child or that, but as a necessity of all children. Whatsoever in a man's mind blossoms and expands to his own consciousness in mature life, must have pre-existed in germ during his infancy. I, for instance, did not, as a child, consciously read in my own deep feeling these ideas. No, not at all; nor was it possible for a child to do so. I the child had the feelings, I the man decipher them. In the child lay the handwriting mysterious to him; in me the interpretation and the comment.

12

I except, however, one case – the case of a child dying of an organic disorder, so therefore as to die slowly, and aware of its own condition. Because such a child is solemnized, and sometimes, in a partial sense, inspired – inspired by the depth of its sufferings, and by the awfulness of its prospect. Such a child having put off the earthly mind in many things, may naturally have put off the childish mind in all things. I therefore, speaking for myself only, acknowledge to have read with emotion a record of a little girl, who, knowing herself for months to be amongst the elect of death, became anxious even to sickness of heart for what she called the conversion of her father. Her filial duty and reverence had been swallowed up in filial love.

13

The Englishwoman in Egypt.– Letters from Cairo, written during a residence in 1842, 1843, and 1844, with E. W. Lane, Esq., author of the Modern Egyptians. By his Sister.

14

Blue eyes are regarded in the East as so unlucky, that the epithet "blue-eyed" is commonly applied as a term of abuse – (see Lane's Thousand and One Nights, chap. XV. note 9.) We find from Miss Pardoe, that a similar prejudice prevails among the Osmanlis.

15

A representation of ladies thus mounted, is found in the Modern Egyptians, Vol. i. p. 240, first edit.

16

Observations on the Mussulmans of India, by Mrs Meer Hassan Ali, (Parbury and Allen, 1832.) The authoress of these volumes became, under what circumstances she does not inform us, the wife of a Moslem native of wealth and rank in India, of whose hareem she had been twelve years an inmate, without once having had reason, by her own account, to regret her apparently strange choice of a partner.

17

Knight's Quarterly Magazine, ii. 414, a talented but shortlived periodical, chiefly by members of the University of Cambridge, to which Praed was a principal contributor under the assumed signature of Peregrine Courtenay.

18

Lane's Thousand and One Nights, i. 176, ii. 345.

19

A representation of the Mahmal is given in the Modern Egyptians, ii. 182.

20

Mrs Damer describes this lady, to whose amiability and accomplishments she does ample justice, as "a sort of Turkish chanoinesse," who had renounced marriage in order to devote herself to her mother – a circumstance which, if correctly stated, would be almost unparalleled in the East. But Mrs Poole's silence would rather lead us to suppose that Mrs Damer was mistaken.

21

A belief precisely similar prevailed throughout Christendom, previous to the year 1260 of our own era: the reference being to the two mystic periods in the eleventh chapter of the Apocalypse.

22

An anecdote of this personage is given in Mr Lane's works, i. 153.

23

It is hareem etiquette to address mothers by the names of their children.

24

Marriages of slaves from the khalif's hareem occur more than once in the Thousand and One Nights.

25

The higher classes are not free from this reproach if we are to believe the story told by Mrs Damer, that Nezleh Hanum punished a female slave who had offended her by the daily amputation of a joint of one of her fingers!

26

A Spanish proverb of former days, defines "Castilian faith and Moorish works" as the ingredients of a good Christian.

27

Lectures on Agricultural Chemistry and Geology. 1 vol. 8vo.

Elements of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology. 4th Edition.

Catechism of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology. 7th Edition.

28

Elements of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology, 4th Edition, p. 239.