to as many possible tastes in his wonderful constitution, and
therefore his food is as different from that of animals in quality as it
is plainly different in quantity and resource. How wise should not
reason become, in order to our making a wise use of so vast an apparatus
of nutrition!...

"There is nothing more general in life than the digestive apparatus,
because matter is the largest, if not the greatest, fact in the material
universe. Every creature which is here must be made of something, and be
maintained by something, or must be landlord of itself.... The planetary
dinner-table has its various latitudes and longitudes, and plant and
animal and mineral and wine are grown around it, and set upon it,
according to the map of taste in the spherical appetite of our race....
Hunger is the child of cold and night, and comes upwards from the
all-swallowing ground; but thirst descends from above, and is born of
the solar rays.... Hunger and thirst are strong terms, and the things
themselves are too feverish provocations for civilized man. They are
incompatible with the sense of taste in its epicureanism, and their
gratification is of a very bodily order. The savage man, like a
boa-constrictor, would swallow his animals whole, if his gullet would
let him. This is to cheat the taste with unmanageable objects, as though
we should give an estate to a child. On the other hand, civilization,
house-building, warm apartments and kitchen fires, well-stored larders,
and especially exemption from rude toil, abolish these extreme
caricatures; and keeping appetite down to a middling level by the rote
of meals, and thus taking away the incentives to ravenous haste, they
allow the mind to tutor and variegate the tongue, and to substitute the
harmonies and melodies of deliberate gustation for such unseemly
bolting. Under this direction, hunger becomes polite; a long-drawn,
many-colored taste; the tongue, like a skilful instrument, holds its
notes; and thirst, redeemed from drowning, rises from the throat to the
tongue and lips, and, full of discrimination, becomes the gladdening
love of all delicious flavors.... In the stomach, judging by what there
is done, what a scene we are about to enter! What a palatial kitchen and
more than monasterial refectory! The sipping of aromatic nectar, the
brief and elegant repast of that Apicius, the tongue, are supplanted at
this lower board by eating and drinking in downright earnest. What a
variety