of solvents, sauces, and condiments, both springing up at call
from the blood, and raining down from the mouth into the natural patines
of the meats! What a quenching of desires, what an end and goal of the
world is here! No wonder; for the stomach sits for four or five
assiduous hours at the same meal that the dainty tongue will despatch in
a twentieth portion of the time. For the stomach is bound to supply the
extended body, while the tongue wafts only fairy gifts to the close and
spiritual brain."

So far Wilkinson, the Milton of physiologists.

But lest these lucubrations should seem to be those of a mere glutton
and gastrolater,--of one like the gourmand of old time, who longed for
the neck of an ostrich or crane that the pleasure of swallowing dainty
morsels might be as protracted as possible,--let me assume a vegetable,
Pythagorean standpoint, and thence survey this accumulation of creature
comforts, that is, that portion of them which consists of dead flesh.
The vegetables and the fruits, the blazonry of autumn, are of course
ignored from this point of view. Thus beheld, Quincy Market presents a
spectacle that excites disgust and loathing, and exemplifies the fallen,
depraved, and sophisticated state of human nature and human society. In
those juicy quarters and surloins of beef and those fat porcine
carcasses the vegetable-eater, Grahamite or Brahmin, sees nothing but
the cause of beastly appetites, scrofula, apoplexy, corpulence, cheeks
flushed with ungovernable propensities, tendencies downward toward the
plane of the lower animals, bloodshot eyes, swollen veins, impure blood,
violent passions, fetid breath, stertorous respiration, sudden
death,--in fact, disease and brutishness of all sorts. A Brahmin
traversing this goodly market would regard it as a vast charnel, a
loathsome receptacle of dead flesh on its way to putrescence. His gorge
would rise in rebellion at the sight. To the Brahmin, the lower animal
kingdom is a vast masquerade of transmigratory souls. If he should
devour a goose or turkey or hen, or a part of a bullock or sheep or
goat, he might, according to his creed, be eating the temporary organism
of his grandmother. The poet Pope wrote in the true Brahminical spirit,
when he said,--"Nothing can be more shocking and horrid than one of our
kitchens sprinkled with blood, and abounding with cries of creatures
expiring, or with the limbs of dead animals scattered or hung up there.
It gives one an