f meat.
Climate and habit are, on such points, paramount. Pig is pollution to the
children of the Sun, the Jew, and Mussulman; but children of winter, the
Scandinavians, could not imagine Paradise complete without it. Schrimner,
the sacred hog, cut up daily and eaten by the tenants of Walhalla,
collected his fragments in the night, and was in his sty again ready for
slaughter the next morning. These things concern us little, for it is not
with plain meat that we have here to do, but with the noble art of
Cookery. That art, which once obeyed and now commands our appetite, which
is become the teacher where it was the taught, we duly reverence. When
aegritudinary science shall obtain its college, and when each Unhealthy
Course shall have its eminent professor to teach Theory and Practice--then
we shall have a Court of Aldermen for Patrons, a Gravedigger for
Principal, and a Cook shall be Dean of Faculty.

VII. The Water Party.

Water rains from heaven, and leaps out of the earth; it rolls about the
land in rivers, it accumulates in lakes; three-fourths of the whole
surface of the globe is water; yet there are men unable to be clean. "God
loveth the clean," said Mahomet. He was a sanitary reformer; he was a
notorious impostor; and it is our duty to resist any insidious attempt to
introduce his doctrines.

There are in London districts of filth which speak to us--through the
nose--in an emphatic manner. Their foul air is an atmosphere of charity;
for we pass through it pitying the poor. Burke said of a certain miser to
whom an estate was left, "that now, it was to be hoped, he would set up a
pocket-handkerchief." We hope, of the miserable, that when they come into
their property they may be able to afford themselves a little lavender and
musk. We might be willing to subscribe for the correction now and then,
with aromatic cachou, of the town's bad breath; but water is a vulgar sort
of thing, and of vulgarity the less we have the better.

In truth, we have not much of it. We are told that in a great city Water
is maid of all work; has to assist our manufactures, to supply daily our
saucepans and our tea-kettles; has to cleanse our clothes, our persons,
and our houses; to provide baths, to wash our streets, and to flood away
the daily refuse of the people, with their slaughter-houses, markets,
hospitals, &c. Our dozen reservoirs in London yield a supply daily
averaging thirty gallons to each head--which goes partly