636 



stances have spread through the Indian Archipe- 

 lago the prejudice of considering hot climates as 

 repugnant to the secretion of milk. We may 

 conceive the indifference of the natives of the 

 New World for a milk diet, the country having 

 been originally destitute of animals capable of 

 furnishing it* ; but how can we avoid being asto- 

 nished at this indifference in the immense Chinese 

 population , livingingre at part without the tropics, 

 and in the same latitude with the nomade and 

 pastoral tribes of central Asia ? If the Chinese 

 have ever been a pastoral people, how have they 

 lost the tastes and the habits so intimately con- 

 nected with this state, which precedes agricul- 

 tural institutions? These questions appear to 

 me extremely interesting with respect both to 

 the history of the nations of oriental Asia, and 



* See chap. 17, vol. iv, p. 317 : and chap. 22, p, 271 of 

 the present volume. The rein-deer are not domesticated in 

 Greenland as they are in Lapland } and the Eskimoes care 

 little for their milk. The bisons taken very young accustom 

 themselves, on the west of the Alleghanies, to graze with the 

 herds of European cows. The females in some districts of 

 India yield a little milk, but the savages have never thought 

 of milking them. What is the origin of that fabulous story re- 

 lated by Gomara (chap. 43, p. 36), according to which the first 

 Spanish navigators saw, on the coast of South Carolina, 

 fi stags led to the savannahs by herdsmen ?" The females 

 of the bison, according to Mr. Buchanan and the philoso- 

 phical historian of the Indian Archipelago, Mr. Crawford, 

 yield more milk than common cows. 



