VEGETARIANISM. 135 



human frame; and indeed performs by machinery a part of the 

 work of assimilation ; enriching the sense of taste with a world of 

 profound objects: and making it the refined participator, percipient 

 and stimulus of the most exquisite operations of digestion. 



Man then, as the universal eater, enters from his own faculties 

 into the natural viands, and gives them a social form, and thereby 

 a thousand new aromas answering to as many possible tastes in his 

 wonderful constitution ; and therefore his food is as different from 

 that of animals in quality, as it is plainly different in quantity and 

 resource. How wise should not reason become in comparison with 

 instinct, in order to our making a right use of so vast an apparatus 

 of nutrition ! Is it surprising if the prodigy of human digestion 

 too often sinks into a perverse development, or if diseases that hap- 

 pen never to simple animals, are engendered in the course of the 

 indefinite appetites of man? 



A controversy that may one day be of importance, and whose 

 data seem coeval with history, requires a passing mention while we 

 are speaking of human food. It has been held by many individuals, 

 and even by sects, that vegetable substances are our natural and 

 proper aliment, and that our taste for the flesh of animals is an 

 acquired and a morbid appetite, the gratification of which unmans 

 us in our better part, aggravates whatever is low and fierce in our 

 characters, and discourages our highest and gentlest affections, and 

 our calmest reasons. As to what may be natural to man, the 

 argument is suspect. An old writer has pithily remarked, that 

 " many things which would be preternatural in a natural state, are 

 natural enough in the preternatural state in which we live at 

 present." Human nature indeed is always changing by its own 

 act and deed — by its own choice of change ; and no change in 

 which it concurs is to it artificial, but it remains human nature 

 still. The career of mankind is a line and chain of new human 

 natures, and nothing is so natural to us now as artifice itself. For 

 the rest, experienced anatomists and physiologists, reasoning from 

 the teeth, and from the comparative properties of the intestinal 

 tube, its length, and so forth, are confident that the human being 

 is omnivorous, and they have the historical and geographical fact, 

 if not the right upon their side. There seems to be a series of ali- 



