ng a kind of poison (opiates,
etc.); when I behold with compassion and sorrow, such scenes of misery
and woe, and see them happen only to the rich, the lazy, the luxurious,
and the inactive, those who fare daintily and live voluptuously, those
who are furnished with the rarest delicacies, the richest foods, and the
most generous wines, such as can provoke the appetites, senses, and
passions, in the most exquisite and voluptuous manner; to those who
leave no desire or degree of appetite unsatisfied, and not to the poor,
the low, the meaner sort, those destitute of the necessaries,
conveniences, and pleasures of life; to the frugal, industrious,
temperate, laborious, and active, inhabiting barren and uncultivated
countries, deserts, and forests under the poles or under the line;--I
must, if I am not resolved to resist the strongest conviction, conclude
that it must be something received into the body that can produce such
terrible appearances in it--some flagrant and notable difference in the
food that so sensibly distinguishes them from the latter; and that it is
the miserable man himself that creates his miseries and begets his
torture, or at least those from whom he has derived his bodily organs.

"Nothing is so light and easy to the stomach, most certainly, as the
farinaceous or mealy vegetables; such as peas, beans, millet, oats,
barley, rye, wheat, sago, rice, potatoes, and the like."

Milk is not included in the foregoing list of light articles; although
Dr. C. was evidently extremely fond of prescribing it in chronic
diseases. It does not fully appear, so far as I can learn from his
writings, that he regarded it as by any means indispensable to those
who were perfectly healthy, except during infancy and childhood. The
following extract will give us--more than any other, perhaps--his real
sentiments, though modestly expressed in the form of a conjecture,
rather than a settled belief.

"I have sometimes indulged the conjecture that animal food, and _made_
or artificial liquors, in the original frame of our nature and design of
our creation, were not intended for human creatures. They seem to me
neither to have those strong and fit organs for digesting them (at
least, such as birds and beasts of prey have that live on flesh); nor,
naturally, to have those voracious and brutish appetites, that require
animal food and strong liquors to satisfy them; nor those cruel and hard
hearts, or those diabolical passions, which