AMOJTG ANIMALS. 



by the direct experiments of two distinguished young phy- 

 siologists, MM. Cloquet and Breschet. After long fasting 

 they ate as much as five ounces of a silvery green and very 

 flexible laminar talc. Their h linger was completely satisfied, 

 and they felt no inconvenience from a kind of food to which 

 their organs were unaccustomed. It is known that great 

 use is still made in the East of the bolar and sigillated 

 earths of Lemnos, which are clay mingled with oxide of 

 iron. In Germany, the workmen employed in the quarries 

 of sandstone worked at the mountain of Kiffhauser spread a 

 very fine clay upon their bread, instead of butter, which they 

 call steinlutter* (stone-butter). 



The state of perfect health enjoyed by the Ottomacs 

 during the time when they use little muscular exercise, and 

 are subjected to so extraordinary a regimen, is a pheno- 

 menon difficult to be explained. It can be attributed only 

 to a. habit, prolonged from generation to generation. The 

 structure of the digestive apparatus differs much in animals 

 that feed exclusively on flesh or on seeds ; it is even pro- 

 bable that the gastric juice changes its nature, according as 

 it is employed in effecting the digestion of animal or vege- 

 table substances ; yet we are able gradually to change the 

 regimen of herbivorous and carnivorous animals, to feed 

 the former with flesh, and the latter with vegetables. Man 

 can accustom himself to an extraordinary abstinence, and 

 find it but little painful, if he employ tonic or stimulating 

 substances (various drugs, small quantities of opium, betel, 

 tobacco, or leaves of coca) ; or if he supply his stomach, from 

 time to time, with earthy insipid substances, that are not 

 in themselves fit for nutrition. Like man in a savage state, 

 some animals, when pressed by hunger in winter, swallow 

 clay or friable steatites ; such are the wolves in the north- 

 east of Europe, the rein-deer, and, according to the testi- 

 mony of M. Patrin, the kids in Siberia. The Russian 

 hunters, on the banks of the Yenisei and the Amour, use 

 a clayey matter, which they call rock-butter, as a bait. The 

 animals scent this clay from afar, and are fond of the smell ; 

 as the clays of bucaro, known in Portugal and Spain by the 



* This stein butter must not be confounded with the mountain butter 

 (bergbutter), which is a saline substance, produced by a decconipositiou 

 wl aluminous schists. 



