FE VER-FA CTORIES. 



H5 



explanation, and these differences may be comprised in a few words : 

 the savages of the tropics avoid calorific food. 



Like their next neighbors, the Hindoos, the natives of Siam and 

 the Sunda-Islanders are mostly frugivorous. Rice, fruits, nuts, and 

 milk, constitute their principal diet, and only famine can reduce them 

 to the use of animal food ; they eschew the sudorific drinks of their 

 European masters, and their only stimulant is a cooling alkaloid, the 

 coagulated juice of the betel-nut palm, which they chew with an ad- 

 mixture of shell-lime. The mountaineers of Abyssinia and the inhabi- 

 tants of the chilly South African highlands are carnivorous ; but the 

 natives of Guinea and Soodan, like the Arabs of the Desert, keep cat- 

 tle and sheep for the sake of their milk, and use their flesh only in 

 times of scarcity or in war. Our Spanish neighbors divide the copper- 

 colored race into two well-defined classes, the Indios 3Iansos and the 

 Indios Bravos, " the tame and ferocious Indians : " the first the frugal, 

 Hindoo-like inhabitants of the coast-forests from Yucatan to Peru; the 

 second the cruel hunters of men and beasts, who roam the wilds of the 

 great West and the table-lands of Northern Mexico and Patagonia. 

 The Indios 3fansos of Yucatan, for instance, live on bananas, corn- 

 cakes, brown beans fried with a little butter or palm-oil, and the abun- 

 dant berries and nuts of their native forests, and enjoy an exceptional 

 longevity and freedom from all sicknesses whatever, in all of which re- 

 spects they resemble the ancient Peruvians, who had no physicians, as 

 Devega remarks, because their only sickness was an incurable one — 

 old age. 



Instinct teaches these savages what our science seems to have for- 

 gotten, viz., that we must not aggravate the effects of atmospheric 

 heat by calorific artifices. Almost all the domestic habits which dis- 

 tinguish the weaving and house-building Caucasian from the naked 

 savage were originally precautions against the inclemency of a frigid 

 latitude ; and it is perhaps the greatest mistake of modern civilization 

 that these precautions have become permanent institutions, instead of 

 being confined to the winter season and occasional cold nights in April 

 and October. We counteract the effects of a low temperature by arti- 

 ficial supplements to our native skin, by weather-proof buildings and 

 heat-producing food, and with such success that De Quincey could de- 

 fine comfort as a supper eaten at leisure in a chimney-corner during 

 the fiercest storm of a November night ; but, when the dog-star rules 

 the season, these factitious comforts turn to a very positive misery, 

 and the same contrivances that shelter us against the fury of the snow- 

 storm exclude the breezes that would temper the glow of the summer 

 sun. 



All the conventional, anti-natural customs of our social life, and all 

 the prejudices of our prudish morality, seem to conspire to make the 

 sunny half of the year as uncomfortable as possible. In a temperature 

 that makes us envy the external lungs of the zoophytes, and seethes 



VOL. XIV. — 10 



