Food for the -Brain,

Cromwell Argus, Volume VI, Issue 310, 20 October 1875, Page 7

Food for the -Brain,

A New York letter reports that, a short time 'ago, a certain Dr Lambert read 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 his 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, in Broadway, their host being Dr T. S. Lambert. Mr James Parton and about twenty others, more or less 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, 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 eighty 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 universology was not affected in any marked degree. The parietal bones of a great Comptist separated, and the coronal suture 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 the 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 fiery buttermilk mounted to the 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.