all and every grade as far as Limburgher, or maggoty, common
cheese--has not, in every case overcome the tendency of the civilized
intestine and constitution to the action of sausage poison, something
that has no effect on the ordinary Indian, or on the uncivilized
dweller north of the arctic circle. Even the house-dog, that faithful
companion of man, in many cases living on exactly the same fare as his
master, is insensible to the action of this poison. An Indian will gorge
and gormandize, after a prolonged fast, on such quantities and qualities
of food that, if the ordinary white man were to indulge in a like feast,
he would be in imminent danger of literal rupture or explosion, or
liable to end in sudden apoplectic seizures, or, in case of a too
healthy and active digestion, liable, owing to a lack of a
correspondingly active condition of the excretory organs, to go off in
uraemic coma. This sporadic and fitful feasting has no perceptible effect
on the Indian, who either simply works it off in exercise, or sleeps it
off in a long and prolonged period of sleep, during which his lungs work
with the deep and steady pull and persistence that a tug-boat exhibits
when towing in a large ship against the tide and a head wind,--working
in and out more air in one respiration than the ordinary white man will
in a dozen. All these different conditions are more or less plain to us
and as easy of explanation,--just as plain as to how and why some birds
eat gravel to improve their digestion. In the cases of different
susceptibility to the action of strychnia or of narcotics, the
explanation must of necessity, for the present, be more or less
speculative. But how are we to account, even in the way of speculation,
for the peculiar immunity, lack of predisposition and hereditary
tendencies to disease exhibited by the Hebrew, who, since the history of
the world, has been a civilized and rational being,--even for decades of
centuries before the civilization of Europe? Living under the same forms
of government, climate, and shelter, practically using the same
varieties of food and drink, he exhibits an entirely different vitality
and resistance to disease, decay, and death,--being, in fact, a puzzle
to the demographic student. The only really marked difference that
exists between this race and the others lies in the fact that the Hebrew
is circumcised, other differences not being sufficiently constant to be
accounted as factors. Circumcisi