30 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



DIETETIC CURIOSITIES. 



By FELIX L. OSWALD, Ph. D., M. D. 

 II. 



TTTE know from the accounts of Sir John Ross, Captain Kane, and 

 V V other Arctic explorers, how persistently the Esquimaux prefer 

 walrus-blubber and whale-oil to the most seductive products of the 

 vegetable kingdom, but the fervor of their devotion was only realized by 

 the Rev. Mr. Hansen, the Moravian missionary, who prepared a dying 

 Esquimau for the glories of the New Jerusalem. "I am sure you are 

 right," said the departing brother, " but, tell me, are there many wal- 

 ruses in heaven ? " " None at all, as far as I know," Mr. Hansen replied, 

 not without astonishment at the question. The weary eyelids opened to 

 emit a look of intense reproach. "And you couldn't tell me that be- 

 fore ? No heaven that for me, then an Esquimau can not subsist with- 

 out walrus ! " 



The peptic stimulus of a high latitude, as recognized by Dr. Boer- 

 haave, may justify such preferences ; but Greenlanders, carried down to 

 our temperate climate and even to the eternal summers of Cuba, still 

 insisted on their daily blubber-ration with a firmness worthy of a better 

 cause. Ferdinand Renz, the European Barnum, found it to his advan- 

 tage to gratify the national taste of his Greenlanders. He had at- 

 tempted to wean them from their traditional grease, and nearly suc- 

 ceeded, as he flattered himself, when his managers reported an enormous 

 deficit of tallow-candles, which he found had been devoured by the box- 

 ful in the silence of night by the bereaved children of the North. 



Nowhere is indifference to the quality of food carried further than 

 in the rural districts of Russia. Black, sour bread, salt pork, cabbage, 

 and quass, or fermented cabbage-water, are the nectar and ambrosia of 

 the Slavonic boor, who in times of scarcity will content himself with a 

 diet that would drive Munster and Connaught to desperation. Quass, 

 their popular tipple, is described as resembling a mixture of stale fish 

 and soap-suds in taste, yet has next to beer probably more votaries 

 than any other fermented stimulant. 



Assassm, assassinate, and their derivatives come from hasheesh, the 

 Arabian word for hemp. A decoction of hemp-leaves, filtered and 

 boiled down, yields a greenish-black residuum of intensely bitter and 

 nauseous taste a stuff not very likely, one should think, to tempt a 

 normally constituted human being. Yet this same hasheesh, Dr. Nachti- 

 gal assures us, can marshal a larger army of victims than either gun- 

 powder or alcohol ; and only the originator of the opium-habit, he thinks, 

 will have an uglier score against him on the day of judgment than the 

 Sheik-al-Jebel, who, tradition says, first introduced the hasheesh-habit. 



