to the physical condition of the candidates for matrimonial honors and connubial bliss. The ancestral record is rarely examined or considered, and yet it has a very important bearing upon life, whether one marries an heir of consumption, scrofula, syphilis, or insanity; for these diseases are notably hereditary and transmissible. The melancholy history of the Sandwich Islanders shows how a race may run out by this sort of deterioration, and the conservative litany itself has recognized the danger attending consanguineous marriage, by providing that a man may not marry his grandmother. The careful stock-raiser shows his faith in hereditary transmission of good qualities of health, strength, and speed by careful examination of the pedigree; and why so well demonstrated a physiological truth escapes notice when a human being instead of a horse is concerned, is one of the incomprehensible things.

OF COOKS AND COOKERY.

"Un cuisinier quand je dine

Me semble un etre divin

Qui du fond, de sa cuisine

Gouverne le genre humain."

The recorded experience of the immortal Sancho Panza during his governorship of the island shows a series of sufferings at the hands of his sanitarian which deprived him of all pleasures of the table, and finally made the governorship a burden that he cheerfully threw off at the first opportunity. It seems that we are now in a fair way to be brought to a like condition on account of the recent scientific descriptions of the diseases of animals and of the adulterations found in our food and drink. The modern representatives of Sancho's sanitarian have discovered monsters hitherto hidden in our drinking water; trichinæ in our pork; the poison of pleuro-pneumonia in our beef; sulphuric acid in our syrup; alum in our bread; rancid old grease in our butter, and

the Lord knows what in our milk. Even the mustard has not escaped the charge of having dangerous poisons hidden in every spoonful. Too much enterprise may not be pleasant, but I suppose it is as well to know the facts.

It really seems of less importance to know what the food is, than to know how it is cooked, and there are many savory foods spoiled through the incompetence of the cook. The ancients laid much stress on the science of gastronomy, as many idioms in all languages attest. "Heaven sends the food but the devil sends the cook," is an old saw that many a traveller will say is as true to-day as when it was written; but in ancient times, as now, there were cooks who knew how to cook. The Greeks, notwithstanding their extreme frugality and their occasional ridicule of the art of cookery, were extremely happy if they could secure a Sicilian cook, and such cooks were sometimes said to have been skilled in the art

of divining, and therefore had the management of marriage feasts and sacrifices. A Sicilian table" was a synonym for a table luxuriously and bountifully supplied; but it would appear that the Athenians were somewhat behind their neighbors in this art, for Dromeas being asked which suppers were more magnificent, those at Athens or Chalcis, replied that the first course at Chalcis was to be preferred to the whole entertainment at Athens. The Greeks very much applauded the feast given by Paulus Æmilius on his return from Macedon, so much so that Plutarch embalmed its virtue in his immortal pages. The Romans, also, placed an equal value on the Sicilian cooks. Montaigne, a century ago, felt unhappy because he should have liked to “taste "the culinary art of those cooks who had so rare "a way of seasoning exotic odors with the relish "of meats." He particularly referred to the service of the King of Tunis, who, he says, "in our "days landed at Naples, to have an interview

"with Charles the Emperor. His meats were "stuffed with odoriferous drugs to that degree of

expense that the cookery of one peacock and "two pheasants amounted to a hundred ducats. "to dress them after their fashion; and when the carver came to cut them up, not only the dining "room, but all the apartments of the palace and "the adjoining streets were filled with a fragrant "vapor, which was some time in dissipating." My credulity is fully equal to the acceptance of all of this story except that relating to the streets, but I feel that the line must be drawn somewhere. Montaigne discoursed pleasantly of an Italian he received into his service, who had been "clerk of the kitchen" to one Cardinal Car"affa. When asked of his qualifications, he “fell to discourse of this palate-science with such "a settled countenance and magisterial gravity as if he had been handling some profound point "of divinity. He made a learned distinction of

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the several sorts of appetites; of that which a