to the comparative anatomists, man is not
structurally a flesh-eater. At any rate he is not fanged or clawed. His
teeth and nails are not like the natural cutlery found in the mouths and
paws of beasts of prey. He cannot eat raw flesh. Digger Indians are left
to do that when the meat is putrescent. Prometheus was the inventor of
roast and boiled beef, and of cookery generally, and therefore the
destroyer of the original simplicity of living which characterized
primitive man, when milk and fruits cooked by the sun, and acorns, were
the standing repasts of unsophisticated humanity. _Per contra_, Horace
makes man, in his mast-eating days, a poor creature.

"Forth from the earth when human kind
First crept, a dull and brutish herd, with nails
And fists they fought for dens wherein to couch, and _acorns_."

Don Quixote, however, in his eloquent harangue to the shepherds in the
Sierra Morena, took a different view of man during the acorn period. He
saw in it the golden age.

There are vast rice-eating populations in China and India, who are a low
grade of men, morally and physically. Exceptional cases of longevity,
like those of old Parr, Jenkins, Francisco, Pratt, and Farnham, are
often-times adduced as the results of abstemiousness and frugality of
living. These exceptional cases prove nothing whatever. These
individuals happened to reach an almost antediluvian longevity, thanks
to their inherited vitality and their listless, uneventful, monotonous
lives. Their hearts beat a dull funeral march through four or five
generations, and finally stopped. But the longevity of such mighty
thinkers and superb men as Humboldt and Goethe is glorious to
contemplate. They were never old, but were vernal in spirit to the last,
and, for aught that appears to the contrary, generous livers, not "acid
ghouls" or bran-eating valetudinarians. Shakespeare died at fifty-one,
but great thinkers and poets have generally been long-lived. "Better
fifty years of Europe" or America "than a cycle of" rice-eating
"Cathay."

The value of the animals slaughtered in this country in 1860 was, in
round numbers, $212,000,000, a sum to make the vegetable feeder stare
and gasp. How many thousands and tens of thousands of acres of herbage,
which could not be directly available for human consumption as food, had
these slaughtered animals incorporated into their frames, and rendered
edible for man! "The most fertile districts of the habitable globe,