Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/321

Rh and those that could be acclimatized in the course of five or six seasons. With five kinds of cereals, three legumina, eight species of esculent roots, ten or twelve nutritive herbs, thirty to forty varieties of tree fruits, besides berries and nuts, a vegetarian might emulate the Due de Polignac, who refused to eat the same dish more than once per season. Honey is the pure, unchanged, and unalloyed saccharine juice of flowers and resinous exudations, and therefore strictly a vegetable substance, though Carl Bock and Bichat describe it as semi-animal food, because "derived from animals," i. e., hived by bees. They might as well include flour under the same category because horses carry grist to the mill. Like sugar, vanilla, and the manna-sirup of Arabia Felix, we might class it with the non-stimulating condiments, which, used in moderate quantities, impart an agreeable flavor to many farinaceous preparations without impairing their digestibility.

Of all semi-animal substances, sweet fresh milk is the most wholesome, in itself an almost perfect aliment, welcome to all mammals and nearly all vertebrate animals. Monkeys, cats, deer, squirrels, otters, and ant-bears, creatures that differ so widely in their special diet, will rarely refuse a dish of this universal food. I have seen snakes and iguanas drink it with avidity. On the other hand, I have noticed that all animals but pigs and starved dogs eschew sour milk; it is, properly speaking, fermented milk, to the taste of a normal man probably as repulsive as tainted meat or sour gruel. This fermentation affects the fatty particles less than the watery and caseine; and butter and cream (though less digestible than fresh milk) are, therefore, far healthier than sour whey and cheese. Cheese in some of its forms is quite as unwholesome as rotten flesh; putrid curd would be the right name for Limburger and fromage de Brix. Vegetarians of the Lankester school object to milk and butter on account of the spurious stuff that is often foisted upon the market under those names, but mild tasted aliments can hardly be adulterated with very injurious substances; a little tallow, oleomargarine, or even lard, mixed with butter, and as such again mixed with a tenfold quantity of farinaceous food, can only affect the most delicate constitutions to any appreciable degree, and certainly not more than the small percentage of alum we often eat with our daily bread. Comparatively speaking, such things are the veriest trifles, and we can not afford to fight gnats while we are beset by a swarm of vampires. We have dietetic exquisites who would shudder at the idea of raising their biscuits with brewer's yeast instead of bicarbonate of soda, but do not hesitate to sandwich that same bread with strong cheese and pork-sausage; or pity the wretch whose poverty consents to North Carolina apple-jack, while they sip a petite verre of aromatic schiedam. That kind of purism often reminds me of the fastidiousness of Heinrich Heine's Mandarin convict, who insists on being thrashed with a perfumed bamboo, "but would have been shocked at a less fragrant hiding."