PI TZ JIABTH-EATTNG AMONG ANIMALS. 
by the direct experiments of two distinguished young phy- 
siologists, MM. Cloquet and Bresehet. After long fasting 
they ate as much as five ounces of a silvery green and very 
flexible laminar tale. Their hunger was completely satisfied, 
and they felt no inconvenience from a kind of food to which 
their organs were unaccustomed. It is known that great 
use is still made in the East of the bolar and sigillated 
earths of Lemnos, which are clay mingled with oxide of 
iron. In Germany, the workmen employed in the quarries 
of sandstone worked at the mountain of KifThauser spread a 
very fine clay upon their bread, instead of butter, which they 
call steiributter* (stone-butter). 
The state of perfect health enjoyed by the Ottomacs 
during the time when they use little muscular exercise, and 
are subjected to so extraordinary a regimen, is a pheno- 
menon difficult to be explained. It can be attributed only 
to a. habit, prolonged from generation to generation. The 
structure of the digestive apparatus differs much in animals 
that feed exclusively on flesh or on seeds ; it is even pro- 
bable that the gastric juice changes its nature, according as 
it is employed in effecting the digestion of animal or vege- 
table suDstances ; yet we are able gradually to change the 
regimen of herbivorous and carnivorous animals, to feed 
the former with flesh, and the latter with vegetables. Man 
can accustom himself to an extraordinary abstinence, and 
find it but little painful, if he employ tonic or stimulating 
substances (various drugs, small quantities of opium, betel, 
tobacco, or leaves of coca) ; or if he supply his stomach, from 
time to time, with earthy insipid substances, that are not 
in themselves fit for nutrition. Like man in a savage state, 
some animals, when pressed by hunger in winter, swallow 
clay or friable steatites ; such are the wolves in the north- 
east of Europe, the rein-deer, and, according to the testi- 
mony of M. Patrin, the kids in Siberia. The Russian 
hunters, on the banks of the Yenisei and the Amour, use 
a clayey matter, which they call rock-butter, as a bait. The 
animals scent this clay from afar, and are fond of the smell ; 
as the clays of bucaro, known in Portugal and Spain by the 
* This steiniutter mast not be confounded with the mountain butter 
(berg butler), which is a saline substance, produced by a deccompositioo 
of aluminous schists. 
