Page:Substance of the Work Entitled Fruits and Farinacea The Proper Food of Man.djvu/31

 —The organs of taste and scent are in strict harmony. When human nature is unvitiated, what is unwholesome is painful and nauseous; but by the repeated use of injurious and improper articles, the integrity of nature is destroyed, the faculty of taste loses its efficiency; pernicious substances may become agreeable; and thus the foundation of disease is laid. While it must be conceded that we have no longer from sight or smell any previous guidance to nuts, grain, roots, and vegetables, as wholesome food, yet taste in one respect furnishes us with a fair test of what is natural to man and truly beneficial as food. That of which we never tire must be natural; that which by repetition disgusts us, though the flavour be high and at first agreeable, is condemned by our instinct, even when custom has vitiated it. It is notorious that bread, potatoes, rice, and pure water are excellent as daily food; but those who feed on artificially prepared flesh require continual change.

Any perverted organ may undergo change of function, and transmit perversion to successive generations: yet the children of flesh-eating parents show preference for fruit, farinaceous substances, and sweets, for which they would gladly forego the most savory dishes of flesh. Boys so uniformly covet fruit, that a theft of fruit by them is apt to pass as a venial offence. And despite of our customary flesh diet, one who has long abstained from it experiences a much purer and more exquisite enjoyment in his own more wholesome food, and wonders at the degraded taste of others. "I am astonished to think " (says Plutarch) "what appetite first induced man to taste of a dead carcase."

.—It is said that the general adoption of a mixed diet by mankind proves man to be instinctively led to it. I reply, many other practices, undeniably noxious, have become about as general as flesh diet.

Tobacco (Sylvester Graham observes) is used as extensively as flesh meat; and its devotees would rather relinquish the meat than the tobacco; yet no one will contend that the appetite for tobacco is instinctive. We know that man naturally loathes it, and with difficulty overcomes his antipathy; yet if everyone were trained to use it so early that he could not remember its first effects, we might easily believe that man has a natural instinctive desire and necessity for it. In the East, where everybody smokes, and nursing mothers take the pipe from their own mouths and put it to the mouths of their sucking infants, the children grow up in fondness for the pipe. This (according to the logic of those who pronounce man naturally omnivorous) ought to prove that it is natural to us to smoke, chew, and snuff tobacco.

The intellect and arts of man enable him to deprave his instincts as other animals cannot. Civilization and luxury have perverted his taste. Sir John Ross found the Esquimaux to