Experience had long taught the Scotch that oats, such as they grow in their climate, are a most nutritious food; but the habits of the more influential English, and the ridicule of a prejudiced lexicographer, were beginning to make them ashamed of their national diet. Chemistry has here stepped in, and by her analysis of both, has proved not only that the oat is richer in muscle-forming matter than the grain of wheat, but that oatmeal is in all respects a better form of nourishment than the finest wheaten flour. But what is more, chemistry has brought us acquainted with the value of parts of the grain formerly considered almost as waste. The husk or bran of wheat, for example, though given at times to pigs, to millers' horses, and other cattle, was usually thought to possess but little nutritive virtue in itself. Analysis, however, has shown it to be actually richer in muscular matter than the white interior of the grain. Thus the cause of its answering so well as food for cattle is explained; and it is shown that its use in bread (whole-meal bread) must be no less nutritive than economical. The true value of other kinds of food is also established by these inquiries. Cabbage is a crop which, up to the present time, has not been a general favourite in this country, either in the stall or for the table, except during early spring and summer. In North Germany and Scandinavia, however, it appears to have been long esteemed, and various modes of storing it for winter use have been very generally practised. But the cabbage is one of the plants which has been chemically examined, in consequence of the failure of the potato, with the view of introducing it into general use, and the result of the examination is both interesting and unexpected. When dried so as to bring it into a state in which it can be compared with our other kinds of food (wheat, oats, beans, &c.), it is found to be richer in muscular matter than any other crop we grow. Wheat contains only about 12 per cent., and beans 25 per cent.; but dried cabbage contains from 30 to 40 per cent. of the so-called protein compounds. According to our present views, therefore, it is pre-eminently nourishing. Hence if it can but be made generally agreeable to the palate, and easy of digestion, it is likely to prove the best and easiest cultivated substitute for the potato; and no doubt the Irish kolcannon (cabbage and potatoes beat together) derives part of its reputation from the great muscle-sustaining power of the cabbage—a property in which the potato is most deficient. Further, it is of interest—of national importance, we may say—that an acre of ordinary land will, according to the above result, produce a greater weight of this special kind of nourishment in the form of cabbage than in the form of any other crop. Thus twenty tons of cabbage—and good land will produce, in good hands, forty tons of drum-head cabbage on an imperial acre—contain fifteen hundred pounds of muscular matter; while twenty-five bushels of beans contain only four hundred pounds; as many of wheat only two hundred, twelve tons of potatoes only five hundred and fifty, and even thirty tons of turnips only a thousand pounds. The preference which some farmers have long given to this crop, as food for their stock and their milk-cows, is accounted for by these facts; while of course they powerfully recommend its more general cultivation as food for man. Again:—In many parts of our island furze or gorse grows up an unheeded weed, and luxuriates in favourable spots without being applied to any useful purpose. In other districts, however, it is already an object of valuable though easy culture, and large breadths of it are grown for the feeding of stock, and yield profitable returns. Chemical researches show its nutritive property to be very great. Of muscle-building materials it contains, when dry, as much as 30 per cent., and is therefore in this respect superior to beans, and inferior only to the cabbage. Under these circumstances we can no longer doubt the conclusions at which some experimental feeders had previously arrived, nor the advantage which might be obtained from the more extensive cultivation of gorse on many poor and hitherto almost neglected soils.—Edinburgh Review.