Excerpt from The Story of Canning and Recipes Marion Harland To the humane reader who is likewise gifted with a lively imagination there is actual pathos in the efforts made through immemorial ages, to preserve for the use of mankind what Scripture has taught us to call "the kindly fruits of the earth." When Science was in her cradle, even the imperfect appreciation of the nutritive, alterative and curative properties of esculents and fruits created the desire to preserve them for use when they are out of season. Natural instinct, which civilization has blunted, not destroyed in the human race, detected the values of that which is the life and essence of all green and growing things - Succulence. What we would be without the bounding blood, foods are when the sap is extracted or solidified. The supreme importance of fruits and vegetables in the dietary of Man cannot be over-estimated. The succulence of which I have spoken regulates the biliary secretions and the action of the digestive organs, and purifies the blood. Drain off the sap from these, and we have tissue and fibre that tax the assimilative powers of organs we would strengthen. Yet for a long line of centuries, mankind knew but two methods of protracting the usefulness of the most precious products Mother Earth offers her children. These were Desiccation and Salt. We need not go back to the period ante-dating the Christian Era when the sons of Ishmael dried the yield of the date palm, subjected it to powerful pressure, and packed it into bags for the daily food of caravans toiling over trackless wastes of sand where no vegetation ever struck root. Nor to the savage tribes of Tartary and their rations of dried horseflesh. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.