Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/72

 the perfection of indolence. All shepherds know that a very fat ewe will not produce a strong lamb.

Some Brahmans pride themselves on their obesity—did one of them ever run a race, or write a book? Chesterfield said that fat and stupidity were such inseparable companions that they might be used as convertible terms. We should not be willing to indorse that opinion exactly; but, if he had said fat and inactivity, he would not be far wrong—though we have seen exceptions even to this. But it is undoubtedly true as a rule. Carnivorous animals that have to earn their dinners are generally thin; domestic ruminants are fat. Animals shut up in cages either pine and die or get fat. At Strasburg, famous for páté-de-fois-gras, geese are shut up in warm coops and overfed to produce the fat (and diseased) livers so much admired by gourmets. In Italy, wealthy connoisseurs are very fond of fat ortolans, and this is the device by which they obtain them: They shut the birds up in a dark chamber, (knowing that in their natural state it is their habit to feed at sunrise). They then arrange artificial lights which can be cast at will into the dark prison of the birds, on seeing which the ortolans immediately seek the food which is provided for them; the light is withdrawn, and they go to sleep; after a few hours it is again introduced, and so the process is repeated five or six times in the twenty-four hours, so that the birds are kept constantly feeding or sleeping; the consequence is, that in about three days the ortolan becomes "a delicious ball of fat," and ready for the table.

In the human being there is, however, a difference, just as there is in the domesticated animals; there is what is known as "good fat," which must not of course be too redundant, and "bad fat." The fat of the florid person may generally be classed with the good, that of the flabby anæmiac with the bad: the latter is recognized in the unwholesome look of the chronic victim of alcohol.

But, to turn from the purely physical aspects of adipose, we wish to invite the reader's attention to a celebrated case of the impediment of adipose in affecting the mental character, and the action or inaction superinduced by this malady.

One of Shakespeare's famous characters—we should say perhaps his supreme portrait—is described thus with one dash of the pen:

The character of Hamlet has suffered such constant distortion at the hands of commentators, and has been made unintelligible and mysterious through a very natural but fatal oversight, namely, the habitual neglect of the annotators to take into the account the physical organization of the Danish Prince—an oversight which the poet never made. He never failed to make the physique conform to the character.