The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866, page 29 by Various Authors
<< Return to Title Details & Download30
d hard. Ours is the latitude of the fish-eater. The British marine provinces, north of us, and Norway in the Old World, are his paradise.
Man is a universal eater.
"He cannot spare water or wine, Tobacco-leaf, or poppy, or rose, From the earth-poles to the line, All between that works and grows.
* * * * * *
Give him agates for his meat; Give him cantharids to eat; From air and ocean bring him foods, From all zones and altitudes;-- From all natures sharp and slimy, Salt and basalt, wild and tame; Tree and lichen, ape, sea-lion, Bird and reptile, be his game."
Quincy Market sticks to the cloven hoof, I am happy to say, notwithstanding the favorable verdict of the French savans on the flavor and nutritious properties of horse-flesh. The femurs and tibias of frogs are not visible here. At this point I will quote in extenso from Wilkinson's chapter on Assimilation and its Organs.
"In this late age, the human home has one universal season and one universal climate. The produce of every zone and month is for the board where toil is compensated and industry refreshed. For man alone, the universal animal, can wield the powers of fire, the universal element, whereby seasons, latitudes, and altitudes are levelled into one genial temperature. Man alone, that is to say, the social man alone, can want and duly conceive and invent that which is digestion going forth into nature as a creative art, namely, cookery, which by recondite processes of division and combination,--by cunning varieties of shape,--by the insinuation of subtle flavors,--by tincturings with precious spice, as with vegetable flames,--by fluids extracted, and added again, absorbed, dissolving, and surrounding,--by the discovery and cementing of new amities between different substances, provinces, and kingdoms of nature,--by the old truth of wine and the reasonable order of service,--in short, by the superior unity which it produces in the eatable world,--also by a new birth of feelings, properly