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exclusively on herbs, grain, and roots, inhabit a climate, against the ex 

 cessive heat of which they have to seek means of protection ; now, the 

 digestion of vegetables is attended with less heat and irritation. The 

 philosophical or religious sects, by which the abstinence from the animal 

 food was <3^^Hered a meritorious act, were all instituted in warm cli- 

 mates. The school of Pythagoras flourished in Greece, and the ancho- 

 rets, who, in the beginning of the Christian religion, peopled the solitudes 

 of Thebais, could not have endured such long fastings, or supported them- 

 selves on dates and water, in a more severe climate. So that the monks 

 that removed into different parts of Europe, were obliged to relax 

 from the excessive severity of such a regimen, and yielded to 'the irre- 

 sistible influence of the climate; the most austere came to add to vege- 

 tables, which formed the base of their food, eggs, butter, fish, and even 

 water-fowl. In books of casuistry, it may be seen, on what ridiculous 

 grounds there was granted a dispensation in favour of plovers, of water- 

 hens, wild ducks, snipes, scoters, birds whose brown flesh, more animal- 

 ized, and more heating, ought to have been proscribed from the kitchen 

 of monasteries, much more strictly than that of common poultry. 



Consider what is the alimentary regimen of the different nations on the 

 face of the earth, and you will see, that a vegetable diet is preferred by the 

 inhabitants of warm countries: to them, sobriety is an easy virtue; it is 

 a happy consequence of the climate. Northern nations, on the contrary, 

 are voracious from instinct and necessity. They swallow enormousquan- 

 tities of food, and prefer those substances which in digestion produce the 

 most heat. Obliged to struggle incessantly against the action of cold, 

 which tends to benumb the vital powers, to suspend every organic mo- 

 tion, their life is but a continual act of resistance to external influences. 

 Let us not reproach them with their voracity, and their avidity for ardent 

 spirits and fermented liquors. Those nations that inhabit the confines of 

 the habitable world, in which man is scarcely able to withstand the seve- 

 rity of the climate, the inhabitants of Kamtschatka, the Samoiedes, live 

 on fish, that in the heaps in which they are piled up, have already under- 

 gone a certain degree of putrefactive fermentation. Does not the use of a 

 food so acrid and heating, that in our elimate it would inevitably be at- 

 tended with a febrile action, prove plainly the necessity 'of balancing, by a 

 vigorous inward excitement, the debilitating influence of powers that are 

 operating from without? The abuse of spirituous liquors is fatal to the 

 European transported to the burning climate of the West Indies. The 

 Russian drinks spirituous liquors with a sort of impunity, and lives on to an 

 advanced age, amidst excesses under which an inhabitant of the south of 

 Europe would sink. 



This influence of climate affects alike the regimen of man in health, and 

 that of man in sickness, and, it has been justly observed of medicine, that 

 it ought to vary according to the places in which it is practised. Barley, 

 ptisan, honey, and a few other substances, the greater part obtained from 

 the vegetable kingdom, sufficed to Hippocrates in the treatment of dis- 

 eases, his therapeutic treatment was, in almost every case, soothing and 

 refreshing. Physicians, who practise in a climate such as that of Greece, 

 may imitate this simplicity of the father of physic. Opium, bark, wine, 

 spirits, aromatics, and the most active cordials, are, on the other hand, 

 the medicines suited to the inhabitants of the North. The English phy- 

 sicians use, freely and without risk, these medicines, which elsewhere 

 would be attended with the utmost danger. 



