Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/475

Rh sheep, and deer—pay an occasional visit to the next salt-lick. The carnivora digest their meat without salt; our next relatives, the frugivorous four-handers, detest it. Not one of the countless tonics, cordials, stimulants, pickles, and spices, which have become household necessities of modern civilization, is ever touched by animals in a state of nature. A famished wolf would shrink from a "deviled gizzard." To children and frugivorous animals our pickles and pepper sauces are, on the whole, more offensive than meat, and therefore, probably more injurious. To savages, too. In the summer of 1875 I stood one evening near the quartermaster's office at Fort Wingate, New Mexico, when two Kiowa Indians applied for permission to water their famished horses at the Government cistern, offering to accept that boon in part payment of a load of brushwood which they proposed to haul from the neighboring chaparral. The fellows looked thirsty and hungry themselves, and, while the quartermaster ratified the wood-bargain, one of the officers sent to his company quarters for a lunch of such comestibles as the cooks might have on hand at that time of the day. A trayful of "Government grub" was deposited on the adjacent cord-wood platform, and the Indios pitched in with the peculiar appetite of carnivorous nomads. A yard of commissary sausage was accepted as a tough variety of jerked beef; yeasted and branless bread disappeared in quantities that would have confirmed Dr. Graham's belief in natural depravity; they sipped the cold coffee and eyed it with a gleam of suspicion, but were reconciled by the discovery of the saccharine sediment, and the cook was just going to replenish their cups when the senior Kiowa helped himself to a vinegar pickle, which he probably mistook for some sort of an off-color sugarplum. He tasted it, rose to his feet, and dashed the plate down with a muttered execration, and then clutched the prop of the platform to master his rising fury. Explanations followed, and a pound of brown sugar was accepted as a peace-offering, but the children of Nature left the post under the impression that they had been the victims of a heartless practical joke. "D—n their breechless souls, they don't know what's good for them!" was the cook's comment, which I should endorse if his guests had been in need of a blister. A slice of a peppered and allspiced vinegar pickle will blister your skin as quick as a plaster of Spanish flies. The lady-friends of Dio Lewis have promised us an "Art of Cookery for Total Abstainers," and, if the book should correspond to the title, I would suggest a motto: "No spice but hunger; no stimulant but exercise."

By avoiding pungent condiments we also obviate the principal cause of gluttony. It is well known that the admirers of lager-beer do not drink it for the sake of its nutritive properties, but as a medium of stimulation, and I hold that nine out of ten gluttons swallow their peppered ragoûts for the same purpose. Only natural appetites have natural limits. Two quarts of water will satisfy the normal thirst of