Voices of the sages, the times and the ages, or, Historic gleanings : teaching the way to attain health and longevity, virtue and happiness, and to avoid disease and early death, crime and misery / [Omega].

Date:
[between 1840 and 1849?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Voices of the sages, the times and the ages, or, Historic gleanings : teaching the way to attain health and longevity, virtue and happiness, and to avoid disease and early death, crime and misery / [Omega]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    says Graham, who formerly spent 15 years in one of the remote counties of the State of Maine, where the inhabitants knew nothing of luxury, but subsisted on a plain, simple, and coarse diet, stated that the people were very remarkable for their fine, white, and regular teeth ; and that although he was the only professional man in the country, he finally left it because he found no business. It is a common assertion which is made by many who ought to know better, and eagerly repeated by the general class of rea- soners, that our comparative anatomy proves us by nature to be omnivorous, but on scientific principles it is demonstrated that we are frugivorous animals, nearest the simice or monkey tribe. The celebrated naturalist Linnaeus, speaking of fruit, says :— This species of food is that which is most suitable to man; which is evinced by the series of quadrupeds : analogy—wild men, apes; the structure of the mouth, of the stomach, and the hands. Gassendi, in his celebrated letter to Van Helmont, says:— I was therefore contending that we do not appear to be adapted by nature to the use of flesh-diet from the conformation of teeth. Since all animals (I speak of terrestrial ones) which nature has formed to feed on flesh, have teeth long, conical, sharp, uneven, with intervals between them; of which kind are lions, tigers, wolves, dogs, cats, &c. But those which are created to subsist on herbs and fruits, have their teeth short, broad, blunt, adjoining tq one another, and distributed in even rows; of which sort are horses, horned cattle, sheep, goats, deer, and some others: and farther, that men have received from nature teeth which are unlike those of the first class, and resemble those of the second. It id therefore probable, since men are land animals, that nature intended them to follow in the selection of their food, not the car- nivorous tribes, but those races of animals which are contented with the simple products of the earth. Wherefore, I repeat, that from the primal and spotless institution of our nature, ,the teeth were destined to the mastication not of flesh but of fruits. Baron Cuvier, whose knowledge of comparative anatomy was most profound, and whose authority, therefore, is entitled to the greatest respect, thus writes:— Fruits, roots, and the succulent part of vegetables, appear to be the natural food of man. His hands afford him facility in gathering them, and his short and comparative weak jaws, his canine teeth not passing beyond the common line of the others, and the tuberculous teeth, would not permit him either to feed on herbage or devour flesh, unless those aliments were previously prepared by culinary processes. Lord Monboddo says :— Though I think that man has from nature the capacity of living either by prey or upon the fruits of the earth, it appears to me that by nature and in his original state he is a frugivorous animal, and that he only becomes an animal of prey by acquired habit. Other equally strong opinions from men of known scientific