PHYSIOLOGY OF TASTE, or PHYS IOLOGIE DU GOUT. This work may be compared in a distant way to the Angler) of Isaak Walton. It is a similar repertory of information, precept, anecdote and personal reflection, a similar stream of pleasant talk by a charming companion who discourses most entertainingly of what has been, after his business, the most unfailing interest of his life. Its author, Brillat-Savarin (q.v.) (1755-1826), was an honored magistrate and jurist, but his fame rests wholly on this volume of tions of transcendent gastronomy," as he calls it with mock grandiloquence and with a humorous reference, perhaps, to Lamartine's which had been the great literary success a few years before. He worked at it affectionately for many years, and only gave it to print, and then anonymously, a year before his death. Its contents are most various. First come 30 on such matters as the senses, taste, smell, appetite, thirst, the pleasures of the table, digestion, rest, sleep, dreams, diet, corpulence, fasting, the history of cooking, in which physiological fact and theory alternate with stones of re membered feasts, bits of strange lore from far afield with descriptions of culinary chefs d'ceuvre that makes your mouth water, racy anecdotes with practical recipes. Then, as if
the meditations had not afforded him latitude enough, he adds 27 varietes, °miscellanies.° But various as are the contents, they all turn about the business or pleasure of eating. Gastronomy is declared to be the chief of all sciences.
destiny of nations depends on how they are
and (Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are," are among the aphorisms which serve as its basis. And the intentional mock grandiloquence of the style and the apparent levity of the author should not de ceive us as to the seriousness of the work. There is much in the book, in its intention, at least, to justify the title, °physiology of taste' It was one of the •first attempts to approach the spectacle of human conduct from the phys iological side. It is perhaps not without sig nificance that Balzac admired it much and afterward wrote a