DISTRIBUTION OP THE HUMAN RACE. 



597 



of temperature, a degree of heat which on the banks of the Senegal causes spirits of wine 

 to boil, and of cold in the north-east of Asia which freezes brandy and mercury. 



This wide diffusion of the species, occupying every variety of climate, soil, and 

 situation, necessarily involves the fact of man being omnivorous, or able to derive support 

 from all kinds of aliment ; for otherwise, if his nourishment depended exclusively upon 

 animal or vegetable food, various regions where the race exists and multiplies would be 

 incompatible with the easy maintenance of human life. In the cold and frozen north, 

 beyond the range of the cereal plants, where excessive poverty marks the only vegetation 

 that appears, the tribes of Esquimaux draw their support entirely from the land and 

 marine animals, principally from fish and seals ; and this is also the case with the miserable 



Petcheres, inhabiting a corresponding 

 district in the southern hemisphere, the 

 chill and barren shores of Tierra del 

 Fuego. On the other hand, the con- 

 dition of many interior tropical coun- 

 tries is not propitious to the subsist- 

 ence of an extended population of the 

 domestic animals and the common ce- 

 realia, owing to the number of the 

 beasts of prey and the interchange of a 

 flooded and a parching soil ; and there 

 we find large families of men chiefly 

 sustained by a peculiar farinaceous diet, 

 the fruits of the plantain and the palm. 

 In the temperate zone, a plentiful 

 Esquimaux Hut. supply of both animal and vegetable 



food is met with, which mingle in the aliment of the inhabitants. Thus, as we approach the 

 poles, man does not live by bread at all, the Esquimaux being unacquainted with it ; while 

 approaching the equator he is mainly supported by vegetable nutriment ; and intermediate 

 between them, he is strikingly omnivorous, various kinds of grain and flesh composing 

 the staff of life. Some naturalists have proposed a classification of mankind, according to 

 the species of food by the use of which they are distinguished. Thus we have Carnivorous, 

 or flesh-eaters ; Ichthyophagists, or fish-eaters ; Frugivorous, or fruit and corn-eaters ; 

 Acridophagists, or locust-eaters; Geophagists, or earth-eaters; Anthropopkagists, or 

 man-eaters ; and Omnivorous, or devourers of everything. But we have no tribes of men 

 that exclusively belong to any one of these classes. The only clear division that can be 

 made of the human race, taking their food as a characteristic, is the very general one 

 already stated, between the inhabitants of polar, temperate, and tropical regions ; and 

 growing intercommunication is constantly lessening the amount of difference even here, by 

 transporting the aliment yielded in abundance in one district to another naturally destitute 

 of it. The locust-eaters include some of the wandering Arabs of northern Africa and 

 western Asia, where the crested locust, one of the largest species of the tribe, is made use 

 of for food, both fresh and salted ; in which last state it is sold in some of the markets of 

 the Levant. Morier, in his Second Journey to Persia, observes, that locusts are sold at 

 Bushire as food, to the lowest of the peasantry, when dried ; and he adds, that " the locusts 

 and wild honey, which St. John ate in the wilderness, are perhaps particularly mentioned 

 to show, that he fared as the poorest of men." The Otomacs, one of the rudest of the 

 American tribes, living on the banks of the Orinoco and its tributaries, are geophagists, 

 or earth-eaters. When the waters are low, they live on fish and turtles ; but when the 

 rivers swell, and it becomes difficult to procure that food, they eat daily a large portion of 



Q Q 3 



