discovered that no alimentary substance is quite deficient in sweetness,
yet there, as elsewhere, starch and gum yield a far greater amount of it
than animal substances.

We have stated that starch and gum can be turned into sugar by art,--but
as no chemist has yet succeeded in imitating an animal substance, the
change of these three into fat takes place only in the body. There
are proofs enough within general observation, that one object of this
portion of our diet is the supply of fat. The Esquimaux fattens on his
diet of blubber and train-oil; the slaves on the sugar-plantations grow
fat in the boiling-season, when they live heartily on sugar; the Chinese
grow fat on an exclusively rice diet,--and rice is chiefly starch. But
one of the most interesting observations of the transformation of sugar
into a fat is that made by Huber upon bees. It was the discovery, that
bees make their wax out of honey, and not of pollen, as was formerly
believed. When Huber shut up some bees in a close hive, and kept them
supplied with pure honey or with sugar alone, they subsisted upon it,
and soon began to build the comb. Wax is a fat, and the honey which is
eaten by the bee is partly transformed into wax in his body. In about
twenty-four hours after his stomach has been filled with honey, thin
plates of wax appear on the scales of his abdomen, having oozed through
eight little openings in the scales and there hardened. Of this they
build their cells.

We have wandered far from the consideration of the propensity of certain
species of plants to take up special compound substances from the
earth; but the wide-spread silex, with which we set out, displayed so
interesting a field of observation, that it could not be resisted, and
encouraged a disposition to rove, which has been to us instructive and
entertaining. To return to plants,--we find they make use of compounds