it,
"put off" and disgusted by a mutton chop. There are others who subsist
almost entirely on fish, others who live on dried beef, others who
live on the fat of whales and seals, and would be for a generation or
two injured, half starved, and some of them even killed, by a change
of diet. Again, there are others who consider that they must have and
will be "ill" unless they had the cooked flesh of an ox or sheep as
part of their daily food. Let us examine this latter group a little
more fully--a group to which the nations of Europe belong, with the
exception of the Italians, who are essentially a meal-, fruit-, and
cheese-eating people.

Apparently at a very early time, even before the last glacial period,
man had learnt the use of fire, and roasted or grilled the carcases of
other animals which he killed in the chase, in order to consume them
as food. We have no reason to suppose that man ever made use of the
raw flesh of higher animals as his habitual diet. His teeth are not,
and never were, from his earliest ape-like days, adapted to true
carnivorous diet. Cooked meat is not the food of a carnivor, but is an
adaptation of the flesh of animals to the requirements of a
frugivorous animal. Probably the use of grain and cultivated vegetable
food is a later step in human progress than the roasting of meat. The
Neandermen, and even the later Reindeer-men (Cromagnards), had no
cultivated fields, but lived on roasted meat (of beasts, birds, and
fish) and wild fruits. We know how thoroughly the most ancient Greeks
enjoyed the long slices of roasted meat cut from the chine, as told in
the Homeric poems, and everywhere in Europe after the neolithic or
polished-stone period, meat was a main article of diet, in conjunction
with the vegetable products of agriculture. In this country, after the
Norman conquest, meat-eating was greatly favoured by the important
industry which grew up in hides. The land was well suited for the
pasturage of cattle, and owing to the smallness of the population and
the abundance of cattle slaughtered for their hides, meat was almost
to be had for the asking. It was thus that Englishmen became great
meat-eaters and that "the roast beef of Old England" was established.
Later the same superfluity of meat--in this case, "mutton"--recurred
and became general when wool-growing and the manufacture of woollen
goods developed into important industries. Relatively to the
population there was more "meat" of oxen