This section is from "The Horticulturist, And Journal Of Rural Art And Rural Taste", by P. Barry, A. J. Downing, J. Jay Smith, Peter B. Mead, F. W. Woodward, Henry T. Williams. Also available from Amazon: Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste.
A paragraph is quoted in Notes and Queries from the Inventor's Advo-cate, dated nine years ago, describing a dinner given at the baths of Lucca by a certain Lord B-----. The meat, fish, and vegetables were at least two years old, having been preserved in a way that is now common; the carafes were supplied with water which originally belonged to the sea, but had been changed into fresh water by a chemical process then recently discovered; the wine had been fished up by means of the diving-bell, from the bottom of the Thames, where it had lain in a sunken ship more than a century; and the bread was made from wheat found by Lord Bhimself in one of the pyramids, and sown in England. To a repast of this kind, we may say, we could now add a dry powder liquefied even at the table into cream, the produce of the cow, and fruit of bygone seasons apparently freshly gathered. If such details had been given not a great many years ago in a fairy legend, they would have been criticised as impossibilities unnecessarily wild and extravagant.
 
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