life and diet. People, whose continual occupation is fishing, are night and day exposed to wet and cold, frequently feed upon corrupted rotten fish, fish livers and roes, fat and train of whales, and sea dogs, as likewise congealed and sour milk. They commonly wear wet clothes, and are exposed to all the hardships of poverty. The greater number of these are therefore to be met with in the lower class; on the contrary, where less fish and sour whey are eaten, and more Icelandic moss (Lichen Islandicus), and other vegetables, this disease is not so prevalent, according to an observation made by Mr. Paterson in the above-mentioned transactions."- Transactions of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The recent testimony of Mr. Hooker is to the same effect. He says, "The Icelanders in general do not attain to an advanced period of life, though many live to the age of seventy, and enjoy a good state of health; but this is among the higher class of people. Scurvy, leprosy, and elephantiasis are no where perhaps more prevalent; and they are likewise, according to Van Troil, peculiarly afflicted with St. Anthony's Fire, the jaundice, pleurisy, and lowness of spirits." In another passage he testifies "that the elephantiasis is cured by the use of antiscorbutic vegetables."

A vulgar notion has been prevalent, that a fish diet is favorable to the powers of generation, and that persons living on it are more than commonly prolific. But this opinion appears to be wholly erroneous. On the contrary, among such persons the increase of the race is very small. Forster says, "In Greenland and among the Esquimaux, where the natives live chiefly upon fish, seals, and oily animal substances, the women seldom bear children oftener than three or four times; five or six births are reckoned a very extraordinary instance. The Pesserais, whom had not above two or three children belonging to each family, though their common food consisted of muscles, fish, and seal flesh. The New Zealanders absolutely feed on fish,* and yet no more than three or four children were found in the most prolific families; which seems strongly to indicate that feeding on fish by no means contributes to the increase of numbers in a nation.'

we saw,

Our knowledge of the average length of life, to which the fish-eating tribes of mankind arrive, is necessarily scanty, they not being numerous, and of a very low degree of civilization.

* The writer must mean that it is the only animal food (if I may so speak) they use. We know that they eat the roots of ferns, and are not wholly ignorant of agriculture.

But as far as our information reaches, it tends to show that this period is very short. I shall bring forward two distinct evidences for this conclusion, of which the coincidence of the testimony is very remarkable.

The first is that of Captain Cook, who informs us that at Onalashka (an island on the north-west coast of America), fish forms a principal part of the food of the inhabitants. They dry large quantities of it in summer, which they store in small huts for their winter stock. Of these people this very sagacious observer remarks: "They do not seem to be long-lived. I nowhere saw a person, man or woman, whom I could suppose to be sixty years of age, and but very few who appeared to be above fifty.'

An account given by Bruce of the length of life of the inhabitants of the largest island of the Red Sea entirely corresponds with this. He says, "At Dalahac, the sustenance of the poorer sort is entirely shell and other fish" (they have also a good deal of goats' milk, and some millet, but no bread). "I could not observe a man among them that seemed to be sixty years old."

These observations are the more worthy of notice, as being made in very different latitudes; and as there are few places indeed so unhappily circumstanced, as not to possess a few with constitutions strong enough to carry them to four-score. They are, in general, conformable to a remark of Friar Bacon, who says, "Bread yields a moisture safer from destruction than flesh, and flesh produces a moisture more removed from corruption than fish." Facts such as these should be well weighed by those who institute and support societies for supplying the poor with fish, and those who are so anxious to promote the fisheries at the expense of agriculture. For it is to be observed that they cannot both prosper in the same places; the occupation of fishing being most lucrative and secure at the season when the husbandman ought to be most busy.

Of all the other substances which enter largely into human diet, the milk of herbivorous animals is, probably, that which approaches most nearly in salubrity to pure vegetable matter. Being secreted almost immediately after taking in food (as nurses constantly experience), it partakes the most of the properties of the food. Accordingly, we find that milk is impregnated with a saccharine substance, and that it is susceptible of the vinous and acetous fermentations. Hence milk is in part vegetable food; and as such, is used by all pastoral nations, and serves in a measure as a substitute for it. The Brit

ish aborigines of our own island were in this condition, living, as Cæsar has informed us, upon milk and flesh.

Many have been sustained by milk alone, even for a series of years; and have avoided some of the sufferings which they had experienced when eating flesh. I cannot doubt, therefore, that to those who can submit to such a course, it would prove more salubrious than a diet of animal food, and, probably, such persons would lengthen their lives by this practice. But independent of the irksomeness and disgust which have been commonly experienced from milk, when used abundantly, it seems to me highly unphilosophical to suppose that there can be any substitute ever discovered for natural diet. There are some gases which approach very nearly in their constituent principles to atmospheric air. But we do not find it possible to use any gas as a substitute for common air, consistently with health. We cannot even add to or diminish from the constituents of common air, without rendering it less fitted for respiration. Why then should we fancy that we may yield to any caprice or fancy with regard to our food; and that any substance whatever, which the juices of the stomach can dissolve, is equally wholesome; or that, because the milk of a cow affords the best possible nourishment to a calf, it is therefore the substance of all others the best suited to a child?

For milk, besides its saccharine and fermentable principles, contains a coagulable matter, the curd or cheese, which is more perfectly animalized, and which is very nearly allied to the albuminous matter of animal bodies. Hence the operation of milk upon the system is in part the same as that of animal food, though it is less powerful in degree. It at first fattens and heightens the color. It therefore possesses a degree of the stimulating power of animal food, and must eventually have similar results. But milk, moreover, in many habits excites headache, thirst, weight, and oppression at the stomach; and in those who have tried to make it the principal part of their sustenance, the attempt has commonly caused an almost insuperable disgust. This, I have little doubt, is the true reason why such an experiment is now so rarely made. It affords sufficient ground for thinking that milk ought to be excluded, as much as possible, from the diet of persons to whom a strict adherence to regimen is necessary.

We give it indeed to our children, and this is so customary that I have heard it exclaimed against as a perfect act of inhumanity to deny it them. But I cannot find that children from whom it is withheld at all regret or suffer from the want of

ing to Clarke, eating raw turnips all day long. We may be certain then, that there is no harm in the practice.

But further, there is every reason to believe, particularly from the observations of the navigators in the Pacific Ocean, that those races of men who admit into their nutriment a large proportion of fruit, and recent vegetable matter, unchanged by culinary art, have a form of body, the largest, of the most perfect proportion, and the greatest beauty, that they have the greatest strength and activity, and probably that they enjoy the best health.

But we see that

This fact alone is enough to refute the vulgar error (for it deserves no other name) that animal food is necessary to support the strength. It may be necessary to those whom the injustice or the artificial wants of society have doomed to the labor of dray-horses. Even this is doubtful. almost the whole agricultural labor of the country is performed without it. It cannot, therefore, be necessary to this species of labor, nor to any other which a man ought to undergo. The same fact may still prompt us further to inquire, whether there is any just foundation for the prejudices which are very prevalent against the use of fruit, as if there were something in it pernicious or dangerous, and to examine from whence these prejudices have arisen.

This notion of fruit being unwholesome has descended to us, even from the days of Galen. He has said, that “All fruits are of a bad composition, and useful only to persons who have been exposed to great heat, or harassed by a long journey."

But this same Galen has soon after acknowledged that fruits afford a perfect nourishment; in proof of which he observed, that the persons who are set over the vineyards, and who live for a couple of months upon nothing but figs and grapes (with the addition, perhaps, of a little bread) become fat. Dr. Cleghorn says that this observation of Galen is annually confirmed at Minorca, it being remarkable that the persons appointed for the same purpose there commonly continue in good health, though in that season tertians usually rage with the greatest violence. Similar observations have been made upon negroes in the West Indies, who live on the recently expressed juice of the sugar cane; and Sir George Staunton says, "As in the West Indies, so in China, the people employed in the fields during this season" (the time of pressing the sugar canes) "are observed to get fat and sleek; and many of the Chinese slaves and idle persons are frequently missing about the time that the canes become ripe, hiding themselves, and living altogether in the plantations.

The prejudices then entertained against fruit and recent unchanged vegetable matter cannot be founded in any just observations, proving that they are truly insalubrious, and unfit for human nutriment. Yet it cannot be doubted that matter of this kind excites, in many, great inconvenience and uneasiness. There are those to whom a raw apple is an object of terror almost as great as a pistol shot. Numbers of people cannot bear a morsel of fruit. Dean Swift, in several of his letters, complains that he could not eat a bit of fruit without suffering, and declares how much he envied persons whom he saw munching peaches, while he durst not touch a morsel. Wood, the miller of Billericay, who set up for a sort of a doctor, warned people strongly against the use of fruit, guided, no doubt, by a similar feeling of uneasiness.

But we see children glut themselves, almost to bursting, with fruits, and suffering nothing from them but a little temporary uneasiness from distention. We see, as I have said, tribes of people principally supported by them. And from the great pleasure which children and young persons, whose stomachs are the most healthy, receive from them, it seems probable that fruit, and the produce of trees in general, instead of being unwholesome, is the sort of matter the most suited to the organs of man. Such was the opinion of the great naturalist Linnæus. "This species of food," he says, "is that which is most suitable to man; which is evinced by the series of quadrupeds, analogy, wild men, apes, the structure of the mouth, of the stomach, and the hands."

We have, indeed, annual accounts of persons killing themselves by eating nuts or cherries; but such relations probably come from persons who are little capable of determining the causes of death or disease. Upon a sudden seizure, particularly of fatal illness, the last thing eaten commonly bears the blame. There may be found in the Philosophical Transactions a grave account, by one of the most eminent members of the Royal Society, of a boy killed by eating apple dumpling. I have never trembled on this account when I have had a good plateful of apple pudding before me.

That fruit and recent vegetable matter, in general, is not merely innoxious, but much more congenial to the constitution than the same matter which has been changed by culinary preparation, may be further deduced from its superior efficacy in the cure of scurvy. The fact of the facility with which this disease, which has proved fatal to thousands of seamen and others, may be cured, is so fully established that it is needless