Our viands

We are so accustomed to look upon bread as the 'staff of life,' the food above all others necessary for our sustenance, that the term, 'without bread,' has long been in our language synonymous with ' starvation.' Hence we find it hard to realise the fact that, if we restrict the term bread to that which is generally so called, that is food prepared from the farina or flour of various grains, not only individuals, but entire nations have lived, and 19 20 OUR VIANDS continue to live to this day without bread; nay, that we may trace the history of mankind back to a time when bread was utterly unknown. The early men who hunted the mammoth, the rhinoceros, and the bear through the forests which now lie beneath the waves of Torbay and Cromer, and sheltered themselves in Brixham caverns, Kent's Hole, and the Victoria and Welsh caves, knew nothing of bread ; they may indeed, and prob- ably did, as savages do now, eat such roots and fruits as came in their way, but it is abundantly evident that they did not cultivate the soil, nor prepare grain for food. They have left us their rude stone tools, and later the bone har- poons with which they caught their fish, the needles with which they sewed their skin garments, and the shell, bone, and stone ornaments in which they delighted, but they evidently lived like the hyenas, their contemporaries, upon flesh and marrow, and it is doubtful whether they even knew how to light a fire, or to cook in any way the game they fed upon. There is, at all events among the older relics, no trace of fire, no implements for grinding corn, and no calcined grains, such as are so abundant in those singularly interesting deposits of much later date, the Swiss Lake dwellings, where corn and fruits of different kinds, calcined and thus rendered indestructible, have been found beneath the mud of lakes where they have lain for at least two thousand years, so little injured by time that even the seeds of the raspberry can be identified. We can prove that these ancient lake-dwellers were advanced agriculturists, because we can distinguish among these remains cereals of various kinds, two or three sorts of wheats, one being that kind denominated Egyptian, two or three barleys, millets, BREAD 21 and peas, also apples, pears, raspberries, blackberries, hazel nuts, and beech nuts, but no trace of any agricultural imple- ment has been found, and we do not know how they turned over the soil, planted their seed, and gathered their harvest. Probably their chief agricultural implements were pointed sticks, such as are still used by many semi-civilised peoples, and they ground or crushed their corn by means of such mullers or hand-mills as are found so frequently among remains of the later Stone (Neolithic) age ; certain it is that they made bread, or at least unleavened cakes of the imper- fectly ground corn ; they also stored the crushed corn in coarse earthenware pots, and ate it either roasted, boiled, or moistened, as it still is sometimes in Germany and Switzer- land. Many of these relics are of a people wholly un- acquainted with the use of metal, yet they knew how to weave linen, to make nets for fishing, and pottery similar to that often discovered in tumuli in Great Britain.