FOOD AND FEEDING 193 



FOOD AND FEEDING 



WHEN a man and a bear meet together casually in an 

 American forest, it makes a great deal of difference, to the 

 two parties concerned at least, whether the bear eats the 

 man or the man eats the bear. We haven't the slightest 

 difficulty in deciding afterwards which of the two, in each 

 particular case, has been the eater, and which the eaten. 

 Here, we say, is the grizzly that eat the man ; or, here is 

 the man that smoked and dined off the hams of the grizzly. 

 Basing our opinion upon such familiar and well-known 

 instances, we are apt to take it for granted far too readily 

 that between eating and being eaten, between the active 

 and the passive voice of the verb edo, there exists neces- 

 sarily a profound and impassable native antithesis. To 

 swallow an oyster is, in our own personal histories, so very 

 different a thing from being swallowed by a shark that we 

 can hardly realise at first the underlying fundamental 

 identity of eating with mere coalescence. And yet, at the 

 very outset of the art of feeding, when the nascent animal 

 first began to indulge in this very essential animal practice, 

 one may fairly say that no practical difference as yet 

 existed between the creature that ate and the creature that 

 was eaten. After the man and the bear had finished their 

 little meal, if one may be frankly metaphorical, it was im- 

 possible to decide whether the remaining being was the 

 man or the bear, or which of the two had swallowed the 



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