476 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



we all know that the old Indian who can eat nothing but dry curries, 

 deviled biscuits, anchovy paste, pepper-pot, mulligatawny soup, Wor- 

 cestershire sauce, preserved ginger, hot pickles, fiery sherry, and neat 

 cognac, is also a person with no digestion, a fragmentary liver, and 

 very little chance of getting himself accepted by any safe and solvent 

 insurance office. Throughout, the warning in itself is a useful one ; 

 it is we who foolishly and persistently disregard it. Alcohol, for ex- 

 ample, tells us at once that it is bad for us ; yet we manage so to dress 

 it up with flavoring matters and dilute it with water that we overlook 

 the fiery character of the spirit itself. But that alcohol is in itself a 

 bad thing (when freely indulged in) has been so abundantly demon- 

 strated in the history of mankind that it hardly needs any further 

 proof. 



The middle region of the tongue is the part with which we experi- 

 ence sensations of taste proper — that is to say, of sweetness and bitter- 

 ness. In a healthy, natural state all sweet things are pleasant to us, 

 and all bitters (even if combined with sherry) unpleasant. The reason 

 for this is easy enough to understand. It carries us back at once into 

 those primeval tropical forests where our " hairy ancestor " used to 

 diet himself upon the fruits of the earth in due season. Now, almost 

 all edible fruits, roots, and tubers contain sugar ; and therefore the 

 presence of sugar is, in the wild condition, as good a rough test of 

 whether anything is good to eat as one could easily find. In fact, the 

 argument cuts both ways : edible fruits are sweet because they are 

 intended for man and other animals to eat ; and man and other ani- 

 mals have a tongue pleasurably affected by sugar because sugary things 

 in nature are for them in the highest degree edible. Our early pro- 

 genitors formed their taste upon oranges, mangoes, bananas, and 

 grapes ; upon sweet-potatoes, sugar-cane, dates, and wild honey. There 

 is scarcely anything fitted for human food in the vegetable world (and 

 our earliest ancestors were most undoubted vegetarians) which does 

 not contain sugar in considerable quantities. In temperate climates 

 (where man is but a recent intruder), we have taken, it is true, to re- 

 garding wheaten bread as the staff of life ; but in our native tropics 

 enormous populations still live almost exclusively upon plantains, ba- 

 nanas, bread-fruit, yams, sweet-potatoes, dates, cocoanuts, melons, 

 cassava, pineapples, and figs. Our nerves have been adapted to the 

 circumstances of our early life as a race in tropical forests ; and we 

 still retain a marked liking for sweets of every sort. Not content with 

 our strawberi'ies, raspberries, gooseberries, currants, apples, pears, cher- 

 ries, plums, and other northern fruits, we ransack the world for dates, 

 figs, raisins, and oranges. Indeed, in spite of our acquired meat-eating 

 propensities, it may be fairly said that fruits and seeds (including 

 wheat, rice, peas, beans, and other grains and pulse) still form by far 

 the most important element in the food-stuffs of human populations 

 generally. 



