Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/157

Rh explanation, and these differences may be comprised in a few words: the savages of the tropics avoid calorific food.

Like their next neighbors, the Hindoos, the natives of Siam and the Sunda-Islanders are mostly frugivorous. Rice, fruits, nuts, and milk, constitute their principal diet, and only famine can reduce them to the use of animal food; they eschew the sudorific drinks of their European masters, and their only stimulant is a cooling alkaloid, the coagulated juice of the betel-nut palm, which they chew with an admixture of shell-lime. The mountaineers of Abyssinia and the inhabitants of the chilly South African highlands are carnivorous; but the natives of Guinea and Soodan, like the Arabs of the Desert, keep cattle and sheep for the sake of their milk, and use their flesh only in times of scarcity or in war. Our Spanish neighbors divide the copper colored race into two well-defined classes, the Indios Mansos and the Indios Bravos, "the tame and ferocious Indians:" the first the frugal, Hindoo-like inhabitants of the coast-forests from Yucatan to Peru; the second the cruel hunters of men and beasts, who roam the wilds of the great West and the table-lands of Northern Mexico and Patagonia. The Indios Mansos of Yucatan, for instance, live on bananas, corn cakes, brown beans fried with a little butter or palm-oil, and the abundant berries and nuts of their native forests, and enjoy an exceptional longevity and freedom from all sicknesses whatever, in all of which respects they resemble the ancient Peruvians, who had no physicians, as Devega remarks, because their only sickness was an incurable one—old age.

Instinct teaches these savages what our science seems to have forgotten, viz., that we must not aggravate the effects of atmospheric heat by calorific artifices. Almost all the domestic habits which distinguish the weaving and house-building Caucasian from the naked savage were originally precautions against the inclemency of a frigid latitude; and it is perhaps the greatest mistake of modern civilization that these precautions have become permanent institutions, instead of being confined to the winter season and occasional cold nights in April and October. We counteract the effects of a low temperature by artificial supplements to our native skin, by weather-proof buildings and heat-producing food, and with such success that De Quincey could define comfort as a supper eaten at leisure in a chimney-corner during the fiercest storm of a November night; but, when the dog-star rules the season, these factitious comforts turn to a very positive misery, and the same contrivances that shelter us against the fury of the snowstorm exclude the breezes that would temper the glow of the summer sun.

All the conventional, anti-natural customs of our social life, and all the prejudices of our prudish morality, seem to conspire to make the sunny half of the year as uncomfortable as possible. In a temperature that makes us envy the external lungs of the zoöphytes, and seethes