r goes naked with impunity, while the European
shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of
these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? According
to Liebig, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the
internal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm
less. The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease
and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or
from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the vital
heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy. It
appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, animal
life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal heat; for while
Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us--and
Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of our
bodies by addition from without--Shelter and Clothing also serve only to
retain the heat thus generated and absorbed.

The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep
the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with
our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our
night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this
shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at
the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is a
cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly
a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes possible
to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is
then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are
sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various,
and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half
unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find by
my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a
wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and
access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained
at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the
globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to
trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live--that is,
keep comfortably warm--and die in New England at last. The luxuriously
rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I