THE SANITARY LEGISLATION OF THE PENTATEUCH. 757 



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 great mistake. Dogs are eaten in China, in Poland, and from tin:ie to time, 

 much nearer home, in the form of sausages. Cats enter into the Portuguese, 

 and we suspect the Italian, cuisine. Rats and mice are eaten, not merely by- 

 Chinese and Gipsies, but find their way occasionally into soups, stews, and the 

 like in Europe. Indeed, in " this our highly favored country," a certain person, 

 probably influential and evidently ignorant, wrote to a daily paper recommending 

 rats as food for the poor, and adding the humane suggestion that any man who 

 complained of starvation whilst rats were plentiful should be punished ! We will 

 charitably hope that the writer was not aware that rats are foci of trichinae, and 

 are with good reason suspected of being one of the sources from which these pests 

 find their way into cats, swine, and certain fishes, such as the pike. The domes- 

 tic cat and all the feline group are frequently and seriously infested with internal 

 parasites. 



The prohibition of mollusca, — or, as they are familiarly called, shell-fish, 

 and as we should interpret the passages in question, of crustaceans, such as the 

 crab, lobster, and shrimp — may perhaps be considered needless. But not a few 

 shell-fish, such as the common muscle and even the oyster, are at times capri- 

 ciously unwholesome and even poisonous. The Crustacea are not merely notor- 

 iously foul feeders — the shrimp being sometimes spoken of as the "scavenger of 

 the ocean " — but their flesh is decidedly hard to digest. The snail is specially 

 prohibited by name. Certain species of this animal are eaten in modern Europe 

 and rank as a delicacy. But as they devour herbs poisonous to man, and feed 

 greedily upon carrion and human excrement, their use as food is something more 

 than questionable. It has been contended in reply that an animal which nourishes 

 itself on poisonous or loathsome matter is not necessarily on that account poison- 

 ous or loathsome. There is some force in this remark in the case of a large ani- 

 mal, where the stomach and intestinal canal, with their undigested or half-digested 

 contents, can easily be removed before the body is eaten. But in such small creat- 

 ures as snails and shrimps such an operation could not be performed without a 

 degree of anatomical skill and an outlay of time not to be expected from the ordi- 

 nary run of cooks. Besides, it is too much to assume that an animal feeding on 

 foul, morbid, and unwholesome matter may be in itself wholesome. The flavor 

 and the odor of animal food, meat, milk, butter, etc., are most perceptibly affect- 

 -ed by the diet of the beast from which they are obtained, and there is hence a 

 strong probability that the flesh of a poison or carrion-feeder will be more or less 

 unwholesome. 



The hare is included among the prohibited species. Unlike many of its fel- 

 low rodents, it is not carnivorous, but it eats many vegetable poisons, such as the 

 bark of the mezereon. It would be very interesting to ascertain in what animals, 

 after death, the volatile organic poisons now known as ptomaines are most readily 

 ■developed. It is possible that in this respect a difference might be found in 

 favor of the "clean " beasts and birds of the Mosaic law. 



As far, therefore, as food is concerned, we see in some instances very suffi- 

 cient physiological reasons for certain of the prohibitions, and we have grounds 



