32 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



sian tonic. Chica, a whitish liquid which in Peru is handed around like 

 coffee after meals, is prepared from maize or Indian corn, moistened and 

 fermented by mastication. 



How a fondness for such abominations is propagated can be explained 

 by any boy who had to drink beer or eat strong cheese against his 

 will, and by and by " rather liked it," but a question less easily answered 

 is how such tastes ever could originate. To the first man who tasted 

 hasheesh, alcohol, or pulque, these substances could hardly be more tempt- 

 ing, we should think, than coal-tar or caustic sublimate. But most 

 articles of food and drink are older than history. All we can do is to 

 trace their progress from nation to nation and from century to century, 

 but their origin loses itself in the cloud-land of tradition. The exegesis 

 of diet is as problematic as that of religious dogmas. 



Natural characteristics can frequently be traced to an hereditary 

 foible for a special diet. French wits unhesitatingly attribute the testes 

 cares of their eastern neighbors to the heavy black bread of the 

 land of Thor, and hint strongly that the reticence and stubbornness 

 of John Bull have more to do with his beefsteaks than with mental 

 profundity. 



" Alas, how helpless is theology against the diet of bull-beef ! " writes 

 Father De Smet in his yearly report from the Sioux missions. It cer- 

 tainly is a suggestive fact that agriculture had to precede Christianity 

 in its conquests over the aboriginal North Americans. Not one of our 

 Indian tribes would renounce the devil and all his works unless we 

 could get them to renounce the buffalo first. I heard a vegetarian lec- 

 turer in New Orleans last year, who gave a resume of the peculiar views 

 of his people, and certainly made out a very strong case in their favor. 

 " The aggressive, the belligerent, and bloodthirsty instincts of all na- 

 tions," he said, " are exactly equal to the proportion of animal food in 

 their diet. The Hindoos, who like pigeons seem to be ' born without 

 gall,' are vegetarians from birth ; so were the Lotophagi of antiquity, 

 who compromised all differences by arbitration. The Malays, who, in 

 the same climate and with the same advantages, make use of animal 

 food, are notoriously cruel and quarrelsome. But in the Indians of 

 North America, who are wholly carnivorous, human nature and native 

 pity seem to have become extinct, and superseded by an artificial in- 

 stinct of bloodshed which equals that of the most ferocious animals." 



The Mexicans distinguish between Indios mansos and Indios 

 bravos tame and fierce Indians between whom there seems to be no 

 generic difference ; but the eastern tribes are frugivorous, cowardly, 

 and harmless as Hindoos, though in stature and facial characteristics 

 exact copies of their western kinsmen, the flesh-eating Comanches, 

 who in cruelty emulate the pirates of Malacca. 



Erasmus complains of the porcine paunches and materialistic ten- 

 dencies of his countrymen, and warns them that, when eating and drink- 

 ing have become the objects of life, animalization will speedily follow. 



