448 PREPARATION OF FOOD. 



raw meat better than anything else. . . . His civilisation 

 has progressed so far that he likes raw meat less, though he 

 will still pick up bones and sharpen his teeth on them.' Of 

 others he remarks, e Before they eat or taste food they smell 

 it, and when they don't like the smell they throw it away.' 

 A boy found in company with a female wolf and her cubs 

 1 rejected cooked meat with disgust, but delighted in raw 

 flesh and bones, putting them out on the ground under his 

 paws like a dog,' according to Colonel Sleeman. Of the 

 same boy Professor Max Muller says, somewhat contradic- 

 torily of the above assertion as to cooked meat, * The wolf 

 child could devour anything, but preferred raw meat. He 

 even ate half a lamb without any effort.' Even ' a quilt 

 stuffed with cotton, given to him in cold weather, was torn by 

 him and partly swallowed ' a kind of indiscriminate appe- 

 tite and depraved taste that is frequently paralleled among 

 the human insane in British and other lunatic asylums. 

 Another wolf child ' would eat nothing but raw flesh.' 



Similar bestial, feral, or animal appetites are likewise to 

 be met with in the human idiot and lunatic, as well as in 

 criminals, and in others of the degraded classes of civilised 

 human society. An idiot described by Professor Cesare 

 Lombroso * smells food before eating,' as a dog would. I 

 have myself had not a few patients who lived in great mea- 

 sure on grass, or the leaves of various trees or shrubs, or 

 who would eat all manner of garbage or any kind of indi- 

 gestible metallic substance. Dr. Browne, too, gives many 

 instances of the use by the insane of raw flesh, of half-dead 

 leeches, and of living kittens, rats, mice, frogs, beetles, worms, 

 spiders, and caterpillars. But all such cases belong to the 

 important category of morbid appetite in man, and cannot be 

 discussed or described here. 



Even among men who are neither idiotic, insane, 

 criminal, nor illiterate, who represent, on the other hand, the 

 highest intelligence and refinement of the age in the 

 armies of the foremost nations of the world the carnivorous 

 thirst for blood during war or battle, may be regarded as an 

 illustration of the difficulty of concealing or overcoming 

 man's natural bestial appetites. But we need not go far afield, 



