I remember well an old nurse who
assured me when I was a student that "some fats is fast and some is
fickle, but cod-oil fat is easy squandered."
There are more facts in favor of some such idea than I have place for,
but as yet we have no distinct chemical knowledge as to whether the
fats put on under alcohol or morphia, or rapidly by the use of oils, or
pathologically in fatty degenerations, or in anaemia, vary in their
constituents. It is not at all unlikely that such is the case, and that,
for example, the fat of an obese anaemic person may differ from that of a
fat and florid person. The flabby, relaxed state of many fat people is
possibly due not alone to peculiarities of the fat, but also to want of
tone and tension in the areolar tissues, which, from all that we now
know of them, may be capable of undergoing changes as marked as those of
muscles.
That, however, animals may take on fat which varies in character is well
known to breeders of cattle. "The art of breeding and feeding stock,"
says Dr. Letheby,[9] "is to overcome excessive tendency to accumulation
of either surface fat or visceral fat, and at the same time to produce a
fat which will not melt or boil away in cooking.
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