2 ANIMAL FOOD RESOURCES OF DIFFERENT NATIONS. 



creation can contribute to our wants, our comforts, our 

 passions, or our pride, that we sternly exact and take at 

 all cost to the producers. No creature is too bulky or 

 formidable for man's destructive energies ; none too 

 minute and insignificant for his keen detection and 

 skill of capture. It was ordained from the beginning 

 that we should be the masters and subduers of all in- 

 ferior animals." 



Our range of food already is specially wide and varied. 

 All the world is laid under tribute to supply our tables, 

 and we are learning to imitate or improve on the culi- 

 nary processes of every nation and every age. In Europe 

 and in America — aye, and we may also add in the far 

 East — men have hunted high and low, on land, in the 

 air, and in the sea, to obtain a variety of food, and this 

 not only in times of war and famine, but when peace and 

 plenty reigned. Not only will men have variety, but 

 they will have it at every meal. There are not, perhaps, 

 ten people in a thousand who eat a single meal consist- 

 ing of only one article, provided they can get variety. 

 Science has taught us that as in nature clay produces 

 one plant and sand another, so man also requires a 

 variety of food to provide for all the elements of which 

 he is made. Other creatures are generally restricted to 

 one sort of provender at most. They are carnivorous, 

 piscivorous, or something-ivorous, but man is the uni- 

 versal eater. 



He pounces with the tiger upon the kid, with the hawk . 

 upon the dove, and upon the herring with the cormorant. 

 He goes halves with the bee in the honey-cell, but turns 

 upon his partner and cheats him out of his share of the 

 produce. He grubs up the root with the sow, devours 

 the fruit with the earwig, and demolishes the leaves with 

 the caterpillar ; for all these several parts of the members 

 of the vegetable kingdom furnish him. with food. Life 

 itself will not hinder his appetite, nor decay nauseate his 

 palate ; for he will as soon devour a lively young oyster 

 as demolish the fungous produce of a humid field. This 

 propensity is, indeed, easily abused ; viands of such incon- 



