Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which
I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be
troubled, or at least careful. It would be some advantage to live
a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward
civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life
and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over
the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most
commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the
grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have had but little
influence on the essential laws of man's existence; as our skeletons,
probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man
obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use
has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from
savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. To
many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life, Food.
To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass,
with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of the forest or the
mountain's shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than Food
and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may,
accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food,
Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these are
we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a
prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and
cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of
fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present
necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same
second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain
our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that
is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not
cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the
inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were well
clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked
savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, "to
be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting." So, we
are told, the New Hollande