urned into a sort of a
carrionly corruption, it must needs be a great difficulty for concoction
to master them, and when it hath mastered them, they must needs cause
grievous oppressions and qualmy indigestions.

Diogenes ventured once to eat a raw pourcontrel, that he might disuse
himself from meat dressed by fire; and as several priests and other
people stood round him, he wrapped his head in his cassock, and so
putting the fish to his mouth, he thus said unto them: It is for your
sake, sirs, that I undergo this danger, and run this risk. A noble and
gallant risk, by Jupiter! For far otherwise than as Pelopidas ventured
his life for the liberty of the Thebans, and Harmodius and Aristogiton
for that of the Athenians, did this philosopher encounter with a raw
pourcontrel, to the end he might make human life more brutish. Moreover,
these same flesh-eatings not only are preternatural to men's bodies,
but also by clogging and cloying them, they render their very minds
and intellects gross. For it is well known to most, that wine and much
flesh-eating make the body indeed strong and lusty, but the mind weak
and feeble. And that I may not offend the wrestlers, I will make use
of examples out of my own country. The Athenians are wont to call us
Boeotians gross, senseless, and stupid fellows, for no other reason but
our over-much eating; by Pindar we are called hogs, for the same reason.
Menander the comedian calls us "fellows with long jaws." It is observed
also that, according to the saying of Heraclitus, "the wisest soul is
like a dry light." Earthen jars, if you strike them, will sound; but if
they be full, they perceive not the strokes that are given them. Copper
vessels also that are thin communicate the sound round about them,
unless some one stop and dull the ambient stroke with his fingers.
Moreover, the eye, when seized with an over-great plenitude of humors,
grows dim and feeble for its ordinary work. When we behold the sun
through a humid air and a great quantity of gross and indigested
vapors, we see it not clear and bright, but obscure and cloudy, and with
glimmering beams. Just so in a muddy and clogged body, that is swagged
down with heavy and unnatural nourishments; it must needs happen that
the gayety and splendor of the mind be confused and dulled, and that it
ramble and roll after little and scarce discernible objects, since it
wants clearness and vigor for higher things.

But to pass by these consideratio