The bread furnished to the prisoners was simply mixed with salt and the dirty water from the brook, or the foul spring in the rear of the bakery, and then dried in the heat of the oven. That bad effects arose from such a quality of bread cannot be doubted; the injurious influences of impure water in panification have been pointed out by Boussingault, in a paper presented to the French Academy in 1857.
It is the common saying in the Southern States, where the use of wheaten bread is comparatively rare, that a bushel of corn contains more nutriment than a bushel of wheat. Yet the southern wheat is superior to the northern varieties, and is richer in the azotized, glutinous principles so essential to the formation of blood and muscle. Vermicelli and macaroni can be made only from the best southern wheat.
Of the varieties of Indian corn in America, the yellow flinty corn is reckoned the sweetest and most nutritive; the white corn of the South makes the fairest, but considerably the weakest flour. We do not find special fault with the coarsely ground meal, provided the cob is not included, for Mayer has pointed out, in discarding the commercial bran we throw away fourteen times as much phosphoric acid as there is in superfine flour. In this bran are contained most of the layers of gluten, in which are lodged the phosphates and the companion nitrogenous compounds--the sources of living tissues. The nutritious Graham bread is an example; also the pumpernickel of Westphalia, the black bread of Russia, the coarse oatmeal of Scotland, contain all the gluten, all the phosphates and nitrogenous compounds, as well as the starch of the grains. Such was the bread that Celsus considered as equal to flesh in its capacity of nourishing.
Fresh meat was rarely furnished to the prison, according to the reports and statements of witnesses, and we should doubt that it was furnished at all, if it were not for the number of sections of the horns of cattle which are strewn about the enclosure, and which the prisoners had used for drinking dishes; still, many of these horns may have been taken from the cattle killed for the guards.
That the issue of fresh beef would have been beneficial to the men, there is no doubt; in fact, the experiment at Jamaica, which continued twenty years, proves it; for the troops who were fed with a larger allowance of fresh meat suffered far less from dysentery than any of the troops of the West India islands. There is always great difficulty in preserving the good qualities of fresh meat in hot climes, and, on the other hand, the use of salt meat in the same regions is apt to engender scorbutic disorders. Whenever putrefactive fermentation begins with any kind of meat, or any recently living nitrogenized substance, catalytic action takes place, ammonia is evolved, and the product is no longer pleasant to the taste or nutritious to the system. Food, when even exposed to vitiated air, becomes deteriorated in quality, just as good flour is rendered worthless by mixture with the damaged fungoid grain. Butchers' meat on the average affords but thirty-five per cent. of real nutritive matter, at least such was the opinion presented to the French Minister of the Interior by Vauquelin and Percy. Accepting this determination, we may form some idea of the relative value of the scanty allowance of the doubtful beef furnished to the prisoners, if it was furnished at all.