Page:A history of the military transactions of the British nation in Indostan, Volume 1.djvu/13

Rh receives the victuals prepared by a superior cast with respect, but the superior will not partake of a meal which has been prepared by the hands of an inferior cast. Their marriages are circumscribed by the same barriers as the rest of their intercourses; and hence, besides the national physiognomy, the members of each cast preserve an air of still greater resemblance to one another. There are some remarkable for their beauty, others as remarkable for their ugliness.

ALL these casts acknowledge the Bramins for their priests, and with them admit the transmigration. In devotion to this opinion some afflict themselves at the death of a fly, although occasioned by inadvertence. But the far greater number of casts are not so scrupulous, and eat, although very sparingly, both of fish and flesh; but, like the Jews, not of all kinds indifferently.

THEIR diet is chiefly rice and vegetables dressed with ginger, turmeric, and other hotter spices, which grow almost spontaneously in their gardens. They esteem milk the purest of foods, because, they think it partakes of some of the properties of the nectar of their gods, and because they esteem the cow itself almost a divinity.

AN abhorrence to the shedding of blood, derived from his religion, and seconded by the great temperance of a life which is passed by most of them in a very sparing use of animal food, and a total abstinence from intoxicating liquors; the influence of the most regular of climates, in which the great heat of the sim and the great fertility of the soil lessen most of the wants to which the human species is subject in austerer regions, and supply the rest without the exertion of much labour; these causes, with various consequences from them, have all together contributed to render the Indian the most enervated inhabitant of the globe.

HE shudders at the sight of blood, and is of a pusillanimity only to be excused and accounted for by the great delicacy of his configuration