134 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 



rather of the physical man considered as a member of society; 

 for apart from society man is not a man, but the most destitute of 

 animals ; an animal without instincts ; with a germ of reason never 

 to be expanded ; with wants never to be known to himself — never 

 to serve as ends of action : his intellect, a sad surmise of a false 

 destiny and lost estate j his jaws, hands and limbs embruted and 

 maimed in the attempt to awaken his dead mother, nature, and in 

 contesting his mights with his fellow-creatures, the beasts. Man, 

 however, as in this late age we are to observe him — man as the 

 unit of society, is infinitely more locomotive than any animal in its 

 natural condition, and as all men are travelers either by proxy or 

 in person, each as a centre can draw his supplies from all. The 

 human home has one universal season, and one universal climate. 

 The produce of every zone and month is for the board where toil is 

 compensated and industry refreshed. For man alone, the universal 

 animal, can wield the powers of fire, the universal element, whereby 

 seasons, latitudes, and altitudes are levelled into one genial tem- 

 perature ; nay, whereby every spot may in time bear its harvest of 

 men, and contribute its proper merchandise to even the poorest 

 brother of the social table. Man alone can command the archi- 

 tecture that will hold the domestic hearth, and on the inevitable 

 model of his own frame, build a house in which he can use, and yet 

 shut out, the universe and its atmospheres. And man alone, that 

 is to say, the social man alone, can want, and duly conceive and 

 invent, that which is digestion going forth into nature as a creative 

 art, namely, cookery, which by recondite processes of division and 

 combination, by cunning varieties of shape, by the insinuation of 

 subtle flavors; by tincturings with precious spice as with vegetable 

 flames; by fluids extracted and added again, absorbed, dissolving 

 and surrounding; by the discovery and cementing of new amities 

 between different substances, provinces and kingdoms of nature; 

 by the old truth of wine, and the reasonable order of service; 

 in short, by the superior unity which it produces in the eatable 

 world ; also by a new birth of feelings, properly termed convivial, 

 which run between food and friendship, and make eating fes- 

 tive; all through the conjunction of our Promethean with our 

 culinary fire; raises up new powers and species of food to the 



