355 
WHAT WE EAT AND DRINK. 
The readers of ‘ Herodotus ’ shudder when they come to 
his account of the Issedones,—a people among whom, when 
a parent dies, the son collects his friends and relatives 
together, slays cattle proportionate to his means, cuts up 
the dead father along with the sheep and oxen, and, mingling 
all the flesh together in one savoury mess, invites his guests 
to partake of the banquet. The reader dwells on the 
incident, which, although shocking for its barbarity, exhibits 
remarkable ingenuity in gastronomy and very singular ideas 
of filial regard. Singular! Not so singular, after all. Will 
it be believed that the citizens of London in like manner 
show their reverence for the dead by feeding on their ances¬ 
tors? Not that they would eat a man plain boiled or 
palpably roasted. London is fastidious in its cookery; our 
city magnates have some little reputation as gourmets; and 
the human flesh was not more carefully disguised by the 
Issedones in a kind of enormous Yorkshire pie than the dead 
are transmuted by the aid of a rare gastronomy for our 
unhappy fellow-citizens. The kitchen where this art is 
practised is the churchyard; the cook is the sexton; a 
mattock and a spade are his ladle and knife; and day and 
night the steam of the hideous olio spreads around, the 
citizens breathe it contentedly, and Gog and Magog grin 
their delight as the odour reaches them. Let no one fancy 
that we are speaking metaphorically. There is no truth 
better ascertained, and which the physiologists of the day 
are more anxious to inculcate, than that the air we breathe 
is as much the food of man as the solids we eat and the 
liquids we drink. Many persons will, perhaps, sneer at the 
assertions of physiology, deny their truth, because not 
obvious to our senses, and hug themselves in the old indif¬ 
ference. These wise individuals forget the story of the 
Brahmin who thought it as heinous an offence to touch 
animal food as we do to taste human flesh. It was shown 
to him with a microscope that he daily partook of myriads 
of animalculoe, and he dashed the instrument to pieces. It 
is shown to the inhabitants of London that they daily, 
hourly, feed on the bodies of their fellow-citizens—fathers, 
brothers, and friends, and they laugh at science, and keep 
up the good old custom .—Daily Press. 
