THE PLANETARY DINNER TABLE. 137 



requires to be strongly attracted to material food ; while at the ex- 

 tremities of the planet food is the gross fuel of life, which is 

 constantly consumed in large quantity, and must be constantly 

 supplied. 



What is true of the world at large holds equally of its countries, 

 which partake of the roundness of time in the whirl of the fluent 

 seasons. Summer is our torrid zone, and winter, our frigid ; and 

 we feed as Esquimaux in our nocturnal solstice, and are as abste- 

 mious Hindoos in our melting dog-days. The planetary dinner- 

 table has its various latitudes and longitudes, and plant and animal 

 and mineral and wine are grown around it and set upon it, accord- 

 ing to the map of taste in the spherical appetite of our race. There 

 is the great ecliptic of thirst, with its lesser circles, the path and 

 parallels of the burning sun ; and there are the poles of hunger, 

 also with circles, terminating in the equator of languid appetite and 

 easy satiety. For hunger is the child of cold and night, and comes 

 upwards from the all-swallowing ground ; but thirst descends from 

 above, and is born of the solar rays. The fluid and the solid are of 

 inverse genealogies, and different centres, and their primordial 

 wants are as much opposed as their sources. Thirst lives in the 

 throat, at the summit of the alimentary tube ; substantial hunger 

 low down ; and the two run upwards and downwards, intermingling 

 their desires, are happily blended in the stomach, and each is lost 

 in each at the extremes. And so the man is solid, or fluid, which 

 you please; the blood so liquid in its vessels, becomes bone in the 

 bones, and flesh in the muscles ; the human form looked at from 

 within, is an ever-changing fountain ; seen from without it is one 

 steady crystal, congealed and unmoving, though rolling swiftly still 

 along the line of years. 



Let it however be observed, that hunger and thirst are strong 

 terms, and the things themselves are too feverish provocations for 

 civilized man. They are incompatible with the sense of taste in its 

 epicureanism, and their gratification is of a very bodily order. The 

 savage man, like a boa constrictor, would swallow his animals whole, 

 if his gullet would let him. This is to cheat the taste with unman- 

 ageable objects, as though we should give an estate to a child. On 

 the other hand civilization, house-building, warm apartments and 



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