FOOD FOR THE BRAIN.

Evening Star, Issue 3940, 11 October 1875, Page 3

FOOD FOR THE BRAIN.

A New “York letter reports that, a short time ago, a certain Dr Lambert road a paper before the Liberal Club on the “ Special Articles of Food adapted to the Nutrition of the Brain, and the Methods of Cooking them.” Preparatory to this, he invited some of Ins friends to a banquet, which is thus taken off by one of the daily papers : “ Last evening a party of gentlemen ate a ‘ brainial ’ dinner at Jones’s restaurant, Broadway, their host being Dr. T. S. Lambert. Mr James Partou and about twenty others, more or less well known, sat round the board and nourished their brains to a somewhat alarming extent. The waiters grinned from ear to ear when they served the food, for not one of them had ever dreamed of a dinner beginning with toasted crackers and cheese and ending with boiled custard and buttermilk. The ‘brainial’ qualities of toasted cheese have long been known to scientific men, and nearly all the members of the Liberal Club are passionately fond of boiled custard, which, as is well known, contains over 90 per cent, of phosphorus, and will readily burn if rum be poured over it. Dr Lambert lectures to-night on ‘ Brain Building,’ and it was to raise the intellects of his audience to a high place that he gave this exhibition of encephalotropophagy, or brainial food. Such a dinner will do occasionally, but is dangerous if too often indulged in. The human brain is about 80 per cent, water, and if it be stuffed with the sublimations of cheese, oysters, codfish, tripe, calves’ brains, oat groats, and boiled custard, it becomes a powerful battery, a perilous magazine, liable at any moment to explode, to the great detriment of its owner and the surprise of bystanders. By the time the sixth course, which consisted of stewed tripe and green peas, was reached, the excitement became fearfully intense, and with the calves’ brains the feast became almost an orgie. The forehead of the Pantarch grew four inches higher with the great pressure from within upon the convolutions, but happily the ganglion where oatmeal becomes uuiversology was not affected in any marked degree. The parietal bones of a great Comptist separated, and the coronal satire widened

quite perceptibly. Around the brow of a mighty spiritualist there was a marked nimbus, where the escaping phosphorus ignited upon coming in contact with the. oxygen of tbe air. It was singular in the extreme to watch the oatmeal rising to the brain ; to see the subtle poison of the boiled custard turn a man into a demon of ratiocination ; and as the they buttermilk mounted to tbe intellect and hurled the reason reeling from its throne, the beholder was fain to acknowledge that the gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us.”— ‘ Sanitary Record.’