DIETETIC CURIOSITIES. 723 



which it had taken him two months to distill. The funeral was very 

 impressive, as the Salzburg chronicle thinks it necessary to observe. 

 We know that our North American Indians are purely carnivorous, and 

 persistently neglect all opportunities of enlarging their menu ; also, 

 that white men who voluntarily or otherwise shared their fortune and 

 potluck for a few years, refused to rejoin Caucasia afterward. Similar 

 stories were told in ancient Greece of the Lotophagi (lotus-eaters), a 

 people of peculiar habits, who boasted that any stranger living among 

 them for a little while would rather resign kinsmen and country than 

 leave them again, only with this difference : the magnetism and the 

 name of the Lotophagi were derived from their diet of lotus-leaves — 

 they were strict vegetarians. 



With every allowance for a possible diversity of constitutions, ge- 

 neric differences, and the modifying influence of climate, the subject still 

 presents enigmas which almost force upon us the conclusion so fiercely 

 rejected by Jean Jacques Rousseau, that nature and habit are inter- 

 changeable terms. Two hundred million Hindoos abstain from the use 

 of animal food, by behest of Vishnu, as they say ; by necessity of cli- 

 mate, as we explain it. But the inhabitants of Southern Africa, in de- 

 fiance of Vishnu and climate, gorge themselves with meat as often as 

 they can procure it, and with perfect impunity, it seems. 



" Meat," says Professor von Liebig, " is preeminently the muscle- 

 forming food ; hence the difference between the stout Briton and the 

 lean Spaniard, the delicate Hindoo and the robust Ethiopian." But the 

 Lesghian mountaineers and the box-carriers of Constantinople, though 

 not vegetarians by principle, subsist chiefly on fruit and farinaceous 

 food, and it so happens that every other man of them can shoulder a 

 load that would task the combined strength of the stout Briton and ro- 

 bust Ethiopian. The powerful arms and the ponderous, leonine bear- 

 ing of the occasional Turks who visit the fairs of Vienna and Buda- 

 Pesth are a fine practical argument in favor of temperate habits ; yet 

 their rivals in strength, the iron-fisted Bauern of Upper Austria and the 

 Bavarian highlands, are notorious for their abject worship of beer. 



But, for all that, it would be wrong to abandon the hope of redis- 

 covering paradise by Dr. Radcliffe's road. Whatever may be the right 

 way, we can not afford to swerve from it, least of all consciously, and 

 that we are astray at present is most distressingly probable. Dr. Boer- 

 haave reminds us that there are certain maxims of health, so clearly 

 pointed out by a priori reasoning^ that we can not be too cautious in 

 the acceptance of contradictory evidence. 



" For instance, the exceptional cases of robust health in conjunction 

 with habits denounced as injurious by all analogy ought to make us in- 

 quire how this impunity is earned ; which strong protector of health 

 could overcome such an enemy. For there is such a thing as vicarious 

 atonement in physiology. Athletic sports, fatiguing rides on horseback, 

 and any long-continued exercise in open air, seem to grant a long im- 



