ng this for granted, he speaks as follows
respecting his diet:

"One would hardly assert that even in temperate climates his (man's)
system requires animal food. I doubt whether any instance can be
adduced--unless man be regarded as such--of an omnivorous animal
incapable of being adequately nourished by a sufficient and proper
vegetable diet.

"Man, dwelling in a temperate climate, and with the power to choose,
almost uniformly employs a mixture of animal and vegetable food; but how
much early education may have to do in forming his taste for a mixed
diet it is difficult to estimate. Habit has certainly great influence in
attaching us to particular kinds of aliment. One who has long been
accustomed to animal food cannot at once abstain from it without
experiencing some feebleness for the want of its stimulation, and
perhaps even temporary emaciation. And, on the other hand, he who has
long been confined to a vegetable diet is apt to lose his relish for
flesh, and, on recurring suddenly to its use, to find it too exciting.

"The liberal use of animal food has been generally thought requisite in
arctic climes, to stimulate the functions, and thus furnish a more
abundant supply of animal heat, to preserve against the extremity of
external temperature. Northern voyagers mostly believe that fat animal
food and oils are essential to the maintenance of health and life in the
inhabitants of those frozen regions. But to me it would seem that their
habits, in respect to diet, prove the _capabilities_, rather than the
necessities, of their systems. They learn to eat their coarse fare
because they can get no other. Their food, moreover, as is generally the
case in savage life, is precarious; and thus, being at times exposed to
extreme want, they are stimulated to greater excesses when their
supplies are ample.

"The fact of man's dwelling in them (the arctic regions), and eating
what he can get there, no more proves him to be naturally a
flesh-eating animal than the circumstance of some cattle learning to eat
fish, when they are in situations where they can obtain no other food,
proves them to be piscivorous.

"Haller conceived it necessary that human life should be sustained by
animal and vegetable food, so apportioned that neither should be in
excess; and he asserts that abstinence from animal food causes great
weakness in the body, and usually a troublesome diarrhoea. But such an
opinion is certainly incorrect, since not