Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/750

730 who hope to cure affections of the respiratory organs by a draught of fresh blood, but who would inspire a Hindoo with a cannibal terror more intense than that produced in the Algerian settlements by the above Kabyle. Herodotus relates that the Scythians executed their criminals by a potion of fresh ox-blood, and recommends this as a more humane method than capital punishment by the sword, though inferior to the hemlock-cup. "For opening the gates of Tartarus," says Haller, "there is nothing like a good narcotic. If I should have occasion to leave this world, I would no more think of shooting myself than of leaving town by being fired from a mortar, when I could take the stage-coach."

The Turks shudder at seeing a Frank swallow oysters, and even in the cities of Europe and North America we find individuals with similar antipathies; and I know an old professor who passed half a century in St. Petersburg, and suffered grievously from an unconquerable aversion to caviare. Caviare is the salted or pickled roe of the sturgeon—not quite so bad as Schnepfendreck, a North German delicacy, which consists chiefly of the fæces of the common woodcock.

Professor H, Letheby, food-analyst for the city of London, is responsible for the following account of a mandarin's dinner, given to an English party and some distinguished natives of Hong-Kong:

But the mandarin was astonished in his turn by finding ice-cream among the delicacies of an English refreshment-table, and predicted disastrous consequences from its habitual use. Ice, without doubt, is