186 MAN NATURALLY OMNIVOROUS. 



food is quite consistent with tlie greatest, strength of body 

 and most exulted energy of mind, this truth is proclaimed 

 by the voice of all history. A few hundreds of Europeans 

 liold in bondage the vegetable-eating millions of the East. 

 If the Romans in their earliest state employed a simple 

 vegetable diet, their glorious career went on uninterruptedly 

 after they had become more carnivorous : we see them 

 winning their way, from a beginning so inconsiderable that 

 it is lost in the obscurity of foible, to the empire of the 

 world; we see them, by the power of intellect, establish- 

 ing that dominion, which they had acquired by the sword, 

 and producing such compositions in poetry, oratory, phi- 

 losophy, and history, as are at once the admiration and 

 despair of succeeding ages; we see our own countrymen 

 rivalling them in arts and in arms, exhibiting no less signal 

 bravery in the field and on the ocean, and displaying in a 

 Milton and Shakspeare, in a Newton, Bacon, and 

 Locke, in a Chatham, Erskine, and Fox, no less mental 

 energy. Yet v/ith these proofs before their eyes, men are 

 actually found, who would have us believe, on the faith of 

 some insulated, exaggerated, and misrepresented facts, and 

 still more miserable hypotheses, that the developement, 

 form, and powers of the body, are impaired and lessened, 

 and the intellectual and moral faculties injured and per- 

 verted by animal food. 



On this subject of diet a question naturally presents 

 itself, v/hether man approaches most nearly to the carnivo- 

 rous or herbivoroLis tribes in his structure ? What kind of 

 food should we assign to him, if we judged from his organ- 

 ization merely, and the analogy it presents to that of other 

 mammalia ? Physiologists have usually represented that 

 our species holds a middle rank in the masticatory and 

 digestive apparatus, between the flesh-eating and the lierbi- 

 vorous animals ; a statement which seems rather to have 

 been deduced from what we have learned by experience on 

 this subject, than to result fairly from an actual comparison 

 of man and animals. 



The molar teeth, being the instruments employed in 



