WHAT WE EAT.

Westport Times, Volume V, Issue 827, 20 June 1871, Page 3

WHAT WE EAT.

(From the " Chicago Post.")

When we pour milk into a cup of tea or coffee, the albumen of the milk and the tannin of the tea instantly unite and form leather, or minute flakes of the very same componnd which is produced in the texture of the tanned hide, and which makes it leather as distinguished from the original skin. In the course of a year a tea drinker of average habits will have imbibed leather enough to make a pair of shoes, if it could be put into the proper shape for the purpose. A great many things go into the mouth. This is not an original remark. We have seen it somewhere. But it is an alarming fact. We drink, every one of us, a pair of boots a year. We carry iron enough in our blood constantly to make a horse-shoe. We have clay enough in our frames to make, if properly separated and baked, a dozen good sized bricks. We eat at least a peck of dirt a month—no, that is not too large an estimate. The man who carelessly tips a glass of lager into his stomach little reflects that he has begun the manufacture of hats. Yet such is the case. The malt of the beer assimilates with thechyle and forms a sort of felt—the very same seen so often in hat factories. But not being instantly utilised, it is lost. Still further ; it is estimated that the bones in every adult person require to be fed with lime enough to make a marble mantel every month. To sum up we have the following astounding aggregate of articles charged to account of physiology, to keep every poor human being on his feet for threescore years and ten : Men's shoes, 70 years, at 1 pair a year, 70 pairs. Horse-shoes, 70 years, at one a month, as our arterial system renews its blood every new moon, 840 shoes. Bricks at 12 per seven years, 120 bricks. Hats, not less than fourteen a year, 980 hats. Mantles, at one and a half a year, 105 mantles. Here we are surprised to observe that we eat as many shoes as we wear, and a sufficient number of hats to sup-

ply a large family of boys; that, we float in our blood-vessels horse-shoes enough to keep a span of greys shod all the while ; that we carry in our animated clay, bricks enough to build a modern fireplace, and in our bones marble enough to supply all our neighbors with mantels. We have not figurtd on the soil, at the rate of a peck a month ; but it is safe to say that the real estate that a hearty eat( r masticates and swallows in tbb course of a long and eventful career would amount to something worth having, if sold like the corner lots on State street, at 2300d01s a front foot.