J50 THE PROTEIN ELEMENT IN NUTRITION 



his critics impute to him to have attributed much more to this 

 effect than he really does. It is certain that there is no climate 

 in which we may not find the same effects produced in the human 

 species, as in climates entirely different in situation and in 

 every other circumstance. The Sybarites, whose territory was 

 not more than a day's journey from the country of the Horatii, 

 the Cincinnati, and the Scipios, were more effeminate than the 

 subjects of Sardanapalus. 



" To produce this effect of effeminacy in Indostan nothing is 

 necessary but to give the man his daily food. 



" The savage, by his chase and the perpetual war in which he 

 lives with the elements, is enabled to devour almost raw the 

 flesh of the animals he has killed. In more civilized nations the 

 ploughman from his labour is able to digest in its coarsest pre- 

 paration the wheat he has sown. Either of these foods would 

 destroy the common inhabitant of Indostan as he exists at 

 present ; his food is rice. 



" To provide this grain, we see a man of no muscular strength 

 carrying a plough on his shoulders to the field. This slender 

 instrument of his agriculture, yoked to a pair of diminutive oxen, 

 is traced with scarce the impression of a furrow over the ground, 

 which is afterwards sown. A grain obtained with so little labour 

 has the property of being the most easily digestible of any pre- 

 paration used for food, and is therefore the only proper one for 

 such an effeminate race as I have described. 



" There is wheat in India ; it is produced only in the sharper 

 regions, where rice will not so easily grow, and where the cultivator 

 acquires a firmer fibre. All the Mohammedans of northern ex- 

 traction prefer it to rice, as much as the Indian rejects a nourish- 

 ment which he cannot digest even in its finest preparation. 



" The Indian, incapable as he is of hard labour, breathing in 

 the softest of climates, having so few real wants, and receiving 

 even the luxuries of other nations with little labour from the 

 fertility of their own soil, must become the most effeminate 

 inhabitant of the globe ; and this is the very point at which we 

 now see him, A.D. 1753."* 



" Their legislators have even ordained different kinds of food 

 to the different tribes. The Brahmins touch nothing that has 

 life : their food is milk, vegetables, and fruit. The soldiers are 

 permitted to eat venison, mutton, and fish. The food of the 



* R. Orme, " Historical Fragments of Hindustan," 1659. 



