In many parts of the coast of our sea-surrounded home, fish is, from necessity, the staple food of the inhabitants; and although whole districts in other parts of the world, such as Dacca, the Mediterranean coast of Spain, etc, are fed almost entirely on fish, our business lies only with our own people. There is no doubt that fish, even the red-blooded salmon, should not be the sole nitrogenous animal food of any nation; and even if milk and eggs be added, the vigour of such people will not equal that of a flesh-eating community. But of all kinds of animal food, the fresh herring offers the largest amount of nutriment for the smallest amount of money, and this statement is the more curious when we think of the turtle, which is produced in such enormous quantities on the shores of the West Indian islands, as well as the estuaries of the Indian coast. Although the flesh of the turtle is palatable and wholesome, it possesses a cloying peculiarity, insomuch that, after a year or two, Europeans will suffer hunger to the verge of starvation rather than touch it. Perhaps this repugnance may be an instinct arising from the fact that the phosphoric fat of the turtle renders it difficult of solution in the digestive juices, and therefore its really nutritious properties are counteracted by this superabundant richness.

So we see that the balance has to be very nicely adjusted: the old proverb, "If a little of a thing is good, a great deal is better," does not hold good at all with our food. We have to take great care that, according to the means within our reach, that supply of the proper proportions of the organic elements which are as necessary to our bodies as fuel to a fire, should be kept up. In fact, food is to our body exactly what fuel is to a fire. If we choke up the range or stove with dust and bricks, the fire will go out; and so, if we persist in supplying the furnace of our life with materials which it cannot possibly assimilate, or use as fuel, the fire of our lives will die out. If people understood, or would even try to understand - and it is not so difficult as many things uneducated people learn quite easily - why certain kinds of food produce certain conditions of the human frame, there would be far less disease.

The great mistake is to think that actual want of money is at the root of the bad food of English labourers. It is not so at all. I do not deny the poverty nor the toil requisite, alas ! to obtain even the scantiest meal; but anyone with any practical experience of the very poor of our own country will agree in the assertion that perhaps half of that pressure is removable by education in the art of making the most of things. I have often seen a poor woman who had been complaining to me of the scarcity of fuel, or the want of food, prepare to light her fire, cook her husband's dinner, or bake her bread, in the most recklessly extravagant manner. So with fish. How often at the time of the Irish famine were the charitable English public startled by hearing that people were starving on a coast swarming with fish ? If it had been possible to teach the poor ignorant sufferers, that although there was not quite so much nourishment in fish as in meat, still it would have made a palatable and wholesome addition to their starvation diet of Indian maize, much distress would have been warded off.

The flesh of fish contains fibrine, albumen, and gelatine in small proportions, and fat, water, and mineral matter go to make up the rest of the component parts. It is curious to find the difference of fat in some fishes, especially mackerel, which possesses a very large proportion, herrings coming next (some people say first), but at all events they both should be cooked in such a way as to get rid of as much of this fat as possible. Enough will remain to make the fish nourishing, but if there be too much fat it renders fish indigestible. This danger needs to be particularly guarded against with eels. Haddocks, whiting, smelts, cod, soles, and turbot are all less fatty, and consequently more digestible, than such fish as salmon, pilchards, sprats, and mackerel. Raw oysters are more digestible than cooked ones, because the heat coagulates and hardens the albumen at once, besides making the fibrine too solid, and rendering it less easy for the gastric juices to dissolve.

We must bear in mind that the flesh of all fish out of season is unwholesome, and often makes people ill. I am afraid Mr. Frank Buckland and other true lovers of pisciculture would view the sufferings of such depraved gourmets with great indifference, and it is, indeed, most shocking to the food-economist to read of the shoals of baby soles an inch or two long, of diminutive oysters, of the ova of the cod, the roe of the salmon, and of the fry of the herring, which are brought to our markets and readily sold in spite of vigilant bye-laws.

It is not possible in this place to deal with the subject of cooking fish : cooking it in such a manner that the fat which renders it often unwholesome shall be eliminated, and the nourishing and gelatinous portions of the fleshy substance made the most of.