barbarous, but even superior races of mankind yielded to the horrible temptation, and that cannibalism has assuredly not been a disease inevitable in the evolution of our species. It is extremely difficult to prove the effect exercised by diet on the civilization of individual nations. All that we can confidently assert is that insufficient or unsuitable fare has always been followed by physical and mental deterioration. In the prolific hunting-grounds of Australia, travellers have found vigorous and well-made people, instead of such shrivelled deformities as are seen on the west coast. It is only in the deserts of Kalahari that the Bushmen are small and emaciated. As to the choice of diet, we can only repeat a general and well-known rule. Food abounding. in carbon is more eagerly seized in cold than in warmer climates. The arctic circle would be uninhabitable to the Hindoo without a change in his dietary rules, as on the other hand it would be difficult for the Eskimo transported to India to devour enormous quantities of raw seal's blubber. If we add Moritz Wagner's accurate observation,39 that in Southern Asia, and in Central and Southern America, wherever there is a want of animal food, vegetables are largely consumed, and that where rice constitutes the daily food, fishing is zealously pursued, we shall have given all the information which can be looked upon as certain. On the other hand, it is not proved that bodily strength, physical courage, and acuteness of intellect, are not as possible with vegetable as with animal diet. Of all the Polynesians, if we except the inhabitants of solitary islands, the Maori of New Zealand were the only people who did not fatten either pigs or dogs, and unless it be assumed that their occasional repasts on human flesh may have supplied this deficiency, it must be admitted that, on a diet of fish and roots, they have become the most powerful, courageous, and warlike race of their family of nations, and the one which has made most advance in the social arts. Probably each of us has at some time had personal experience of the effects of alcohols and narcotics, and has perhaps observed that a moderate use of wine is capable of raising us above the 39 Allgemeine Zeitung. 1871. prosaic state of our every-day life. With many the excitement produced by tea or coffee is still more powerful. When we feel ourselves thus strengthened, it seems as if we were able to see more clearly and to argue more acutely. Ideas previously eagerly but unsuccessfully sought now crowd upon us in rapid succession, and new truths seem to be within our grasp. This would seem to show, perhaps, that the movements evoked by our mental functions have been accelerated by narcotics, or their length of vibration increased. Mental progress must perhaps have become perceptibly more rapid in human society since the discovery of these magic potions. Let us be warned by the errors of Buckle, who, lured on by deceptive facts of this description, deceived himself and a willingly deluded multitude into a belief that it is possible to explain the course of the history of the most highly civilized nations by the chemical constituents of their food. The rapid rate of intellectual progress in our days is primarily due to the adjustments of modern society, which furnishes science with many more disciples, and these all better prepared than formerly. The greatest inventions of mankind, hieroglyphic and phonetic writing, the division of time, weights and measures, the positional value of figures, are older than the acquaintance with narcotics, and to wine alone could we ascribe any share in this service. The Mosaic conception of God, the Zoroastrian dualism, Christianity and Islam, Indian legends and philosophies, have all arisen without the aid of narcotics. During the age of Chinese invention, that is to say, during the first three dynasties, tea was unknown in China. Copernicus devised his system, Galileo confirmed it, and Kepler proved it by his laws, without coffee and without knowing its very name. Hence it is more prudent not to enter upon the obscure inquiry as to the excitability of our intellectual faculties by means of stimulants. Of equal importance with food is its preparation. The consumption of raw flesh and fat is habitual only among the Eskimo, although it occurs exceptionally elsewhere. Among other people glowing embers and a wooden spit are generally employed for roasting. The rinds of gourds, or the shells of nuts, mostly serve as drinking vessels, and among Bushmen occasionally the eggs of the ostrich. Their neighbours, the Betchuans and Kaffirs, plait baskets so closely that liquids are retained in them.40 Unserviceable as wooden vessels may seem for boiling water, human sagacity hit upon the expedient of making stones red hot, and then dropping them into water in such wooden vessel. In this manner cooking was first carried on. A yet simpler method is pursued by a tribe of Red Indians in the north of the prairies. They line a hole made in the ground with the skin of the slaughtered game, pour water upon it, and heat the water with red-hot stones, hence the Ojibwas called these tribes the Assiniboins, or stone-cookers.41 Since commerce has supplied them with earthenware vessels and cauldrons, this primitive mode of dressing meat has been practised only on festive occasions.42 Beyond the Rocky Mountains, the Ahts of Vancouver's Island,43 as well as the Tshinuks of Oregon, use heated stones and wooden vessels for cooking,44 and the Kolushs further to the north occasionally employ their canoes as kettles for boiling large fish. The Kamtskadals also cook by means of heated stones dropped into wooden troughs.45 Even in Europe, as Linnæus records, cooking with stones had been retained in Finnish East Bothland as a remnant of remote past ages.46 Tylor has ascertained that heated stones were used in Ireland for warming milk even in the year 1600, and that in the Hebrides in the sixteenth century meat was still cooked in the skin of the animal.47 This last method was customary in the woodless southern steppes of Russia at the time of Herodotus. He says that the Scyths used the bones as fuel, and the skin of the animal as a vessel in which the meat and water was placed during the process of cooking.48 The Polynesians, who had no earthenware utensils, prepared their food in pits lined with leaves, on which the 40 Casalis, Les Bassoutos. Paris, 1859. T. G. Wood, Natural History of Man; Africa, p. 63. 41 Catlin, Indianer Nordamerika's. Leipzic, 1851. 42 The Patagonians do the same when on their hunting expeditions, although at home they use iron kettles. Musters, Journal of Anthrop. Institute. 1872. 43 Ausland. 1868. "Waitz, Anthropologie, vol. iii. p. 336. 45 G. W. Steller, Kamtschatka. 1774. 46 Linnæus, quoted by Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 270. 47 Tylor, Primitive Culture, p. 272. 48 Herod. lib. iv. cap. 61. animal or vegetable food was placed with some heated stones; the holes were then filled up with leaves and covered over with earth. From all this we get a clear idea of the mode of dressing food implied, when it is said of a people that they cook with stones, or that they possess no earthen vessels. Mankind may have discovered how to manufacture earthen vessels in various ways. Sir John Lubbock points out that Captain Cook saw stones surrounded with a rim of clay in use among the Aleutians on Unalashka; but this might be an imitation of European vessels with which the islanders had already become acquainted through Russian sailors. The practice of the Australians on the Lower Murray river, of puddling holes in the earth with clay, and cooking food in them, might perhaps have led an inventive mind to the manufacture of earthen vessels. But the process is better explained by the account of the French sailor Gonneville, who, in 1504, landed on a South Atlantic coast, probably in Brazil. 49 He describes certain wooden vessels in use among the natives (in whom D'Avezac fancies that he recognizes Brazilian Carijo), enveloped in a coating of clay as a protection from the fire.50 If by chance the wooden bowl separated itself from the covering of clay, an earthen vessel would remain. In examining the site of an old pottery manufactory of the Red Indians on the Cahokia, which falls into the Mississippi below St. Louis, Carl Rau discovered half-finished vessels, that is to say, baskets of rushes or willow, lined inside with clay. When the vessel was baked the fire naturally consumed the external covering. Half-finished vessels from the Southern States show that the rinds of gourds instead of baskets were lined with clay.51 Hence the art of making pottery was independently invented in America and in the Old World, in centres of civilization unknown to us. From this centre it may have spread over the whole of Africa, with the sole exception of the Bushman district, but not to the extreme north-east of Asia, and not across Behring's Straits. That the Europeans of prehistoric times also originally 49 Pierre Margry, Les Navigations françaises. 1867. Earthenware Vessels. 169 lined basket-work with clay, may be inferred from the decorations of vessels of the stone age. These decorations consist merely of rows of marks made with the finger nail, as if to represent the traces left by the basket work. 52 When some bold individual began to shape the clay by hand, his earthen vessels were perhaps regarded as not genuine, or of inferior quality, as they had not originated in the time-honoured fashion; in order to meet these doubts he may have counterfeited the impressions of the rushes with his nail. In South America even the Botocudos possess earthen vessels, as do all the natives with the exception of a few tribes of the Pampas.53 Nor are they wanting among the Papuans; but they do not exist among the Polynesians and Australians. All races use their cutting implements to divide the meat into large pieces, in which operation barbarous nations generally exhibit great anatomical dexterity. Forks, which, as we shall see, were unknown in Northern Europe only a few centuries ago,54 are, as a rule, found only in nations of mature civilization, but they are in use among the Papuans of the Fiji Islands.55 The mussel shell suggested the first idea of the spoon, and still performs its functions on the Atlantic shores of Morocco.56 On the White Nile the Bari negroes eat their meal porridge with wooden spoons, and the Kitsh negroes with the shells of fresh-water mussels. 57 In Southern Africa the Hottentots use spoons made of mother-of-pearl or of tortoiseshell; 58 among the Bantu negroes these utensils are artistically carved out of wood and adorned with figures of animals.59 Chop-sticks, after the Chinese fashion, and cooking spoons are in use among the Papuans of New Guinea.60 52 G. Klemm, Allgemeine Culturgeschichte. 1843. 53 D'Orbigny, l'Homme américain. 54 Little is known about the use of forks in Europe. Tylor has ascertained that in Ruysbroek's time (1253) forks were in use among the Mongols as well as in the west. (Early History of Mankind, p. 22). 55 Williams, Fiji, vol. i. p. 212. 56 Gerhard Rohlfs, Erster Aufenthalt in Marokko. 1873. 57 W. von Harnier, Reise am obern Nil. 58 Kolben's Reise an das Vorgeb. d. G. Hoffnung. 59 Casalis, Les Bassoutos. Paris, 1859. Kon Institut vor taal-land-en 60 Otto Finsch, New Guinea, 1865; and Nieuw Guinea, ethnographisch en natuurkundig onderzocht, uitgegeven door hetv. volkenkunde. Amsterdam, 1862. |