Time was when the foremost aim and ambition of the English housewife was to gain a full knowledge of her own duties and of the duties of her servants. In those days, bread was home-baked, butter home-made, beer home-brewed, gowns home-sewn, to a far greater extent than now.

With the advance of education, there is much reason to fear that the essentially domestic part of the training of our daughters is being more and more neglected. Yet what can be more important for the comfort and welfare of the household than an appreciation of their needs and an ability to furnish them. Accomplishments, all very good in their way, must, to the true housewife, be secondary to all that concerns the health, the feeding, the clothing, the housing of those under her care.

And what a range of knowledge this implies,—from sanitary engineering to patching a garment, from bandaging a wound to keeping the frost out of water pipes. It may safely be said that the mistress of a family is called upon to exercise an amount of skill and learning in her daily routine such as is demanded of few men, and this too without the benefit of any special education or preparation; for where is the school or college which includes among its “subjects” the study of such every-day matters as bad drains, or the gapes in chickens, or the removal of stains from clothes, or the bandaging of wounds, or the management of a kitchen range? Indeed, it is worthy of consideration whether our schools of cookery might not with very great advantage be supplemented by schools of general household instruction.

Till this suggestion is carried out, the housewife can only refer to books and papers for information and advice. The editors of the present volume have been guided by a determination to make it a book of reference such as no housewife can afford to be without. Much of the matter is, of course, not altogether new, but it has been arranged with great care in a systematic manner, and while the use of obscure scientific terms has been avoided, the teachings of modern science have been made the basis of those sections in which science plays a part.

Much of the information herein contained has appeared before in lectures, pamphlets, and newspapers, foremost among these last being the Queen, Field, Lancet, Scientific American, Pharmaceutical Journal, Gardener’s Chronicle, and the Bazaar; but it has lost nothing by repetition, and has this advantage in being embodied in a substantial volume that it can always be readily found when wanted, while every one knows the fate of leaflets and journals. The sources whence information has been drawn have, it is believed, in every case been acknowledged, and the editors take this opportunity of again proclaiming their indebtedness to the very large number of lecturers and writers whose communications have found a place within these covers.

The Editors.