his skeleton, and more than all this, by far the greater part of his body is nothing after all but water, and the main substance of his scattered members is to be looked for in the reservoir, in the running streams, at the bottom of the well, in the clouds that float over his head, or diffused among them all."

The rapidity with which the food of to-day is incorporated intc the body of to-morrow, should make us prudent in what we eat, if we would preserve our blood from impurity, and the atoms composing our bodies from disease. How prudent the human family is, may be seen by sitting at the tables of various peoples, civilized and barbarous. At home we are treated to all sorts of mixed dishes, seasoned with condiments, and saturated with the oleaginous juices of swine. Few of us stop to reflect that there may be as much antagonism in the stomach between the various kinds of flesh taken into it, as exists in the living world between the living bodies whose flesh we eat. A fashionable dinner comprises about three courses of different animal food; in some cases turtle soup, then fish of some kind, then roast beef or turkey, with side dishes of mutton or lamb, veal or pork, etc. It cannot, perhaps, be demonstrated, but is it not reasonable to suppose, that each one of these meats possess a latent magnetism, as individual in its character as when animated by life. If so, the stomachs of some people have, every day, to conciliate and make up a happy family of a great diversity of magnetic elements. To live fashionably is to live improperly.

Now let us step intrusively into the kitchens of our neighbors. John Chinaman feasts his stomach on cats, dogs, wharf-rats, seaslugs, sharks, bats, and caterpillar soup. Australians, and many other people, eat snakes, kangaroo-rats, mice, maggots, etc. The Japanese prefer green peaches, apricots, and plums, to ripe ones, a an offset, I suppose, to our eating green cucumbers. A traveler among the Indians of the Rocky Mountains, or a guest of the people of Zanzibar, will smack his astonished lips over puppy stew, without knowing what it is made of. One who visits Africa, may have a plate of tender young monkey; while the people of the Arctics treat their visitors to a diet of putrid seal's flesh, putrid whale's tail, reindeer's chyle, train oil, whale's skin, and partially hatched eggs. The native of Surinam eats toads, and the Hottentot considers roasted caterpillars to be savory as sugared cream. Frogs are eaten by the French, by the Chinese, and by many people in both

Europe and America. The French have lately taken to eating snails, having found their flavor superior to that of frogs. One hundred thousand are daily supplied to Paris by Burgundy and Champagne alone. On the Maguey plant in Mexico, a large yellow worm thrives, which the native Indian eats, and calls the dish Maguey butter. A Tribune correspondent is responsible for the statement that Emperor Maximilian was induced to try it. In brief, among the many strange things used as food, not already mentioned, may be named: elephant, hippopotamus, giraffe, zebra, antelope, wild ants, leopard, lion, alligator, crocodile, eggs of reptiles, lizard, wild-cat, panther, wolf, opossum, musk-rat, rat's brains, porcupine, bird's nest, locust, grasshopper, spider, and nearly every insect; and the Chinamen are so given to domestic economy as to eat the chrysalis of the silk-worm after the cocoon has been wound off. In New York, the testicles of young animals are considered a dish for

an epteure by many citizens. Charles Louis Napoleon Achille Murat, son of the great French general, who spent the closing years of his life in Florida, and who had tried all sorts of eating, declared as follows:

"Horse-flesh, good-dog, fox, and cat, only middling—skunk, tolerably good-hawk, first-rate-crow, second-rate-pigeon, jay bird, and blackbird, tolerable, and he added, "though I have no prepossession, buzzard is not good."

Now, nearly all the foregoing animals, insects, etc., contain the true constituents of food, and many of them are not unwholesome. Some indeed which seem revolting to an educated taste, are better and purer for aliment than others which we regard as above criticism. To sustain life, we simply need food which possesses saccharine, oleaginous, albuminous, and gelatinous properties, combined with a proper admixture of salt, sulphur, iron, lime, and phosphorus. But what we should do is to avoid food which, possessing all the neces sary alimentary elements, is also tainted by disease.

One of the most common causes of blood impurities is the use of pork. It has been said that all things were created for some wise purpose. This is undoubtedly true, but hogs were never made to eat.

We read that Christ used them to drown devils; they can never be appropriated to a more beneficent use. As an article of diet, pork exerts a most pernicious influence on the blood, overloading it with carbonic acid gas, and filling it with scrofula. The hog is not a

healthy animal. From its birth it is an inveterate gormandizer, and to satisfy its eternal cravings for food, every thing in field or gutter, however filthy, finds lodgment in its capacious stomach. It eats filth and wallows in its filth, and is itself but a living mass of filth. When, therefore, it is remembered that all our limbs and organs

"And when they were come out, they [the devils] went into the herd of swine: and, be hold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters."-St. Matthew, 8th chap., 32d verse.

have been picked up from our plates-that our bodies are made up of the things we have eaten-what pork-eater will felicitate himself with the reflection, that, according to physiological teachings, he is physically part hog. "We have been served up at the table many times over. Every individual is literally a mass of vivified viands; he is an epitome of innumerable meals; he has dined upon himself,

supped upon himself, and in fact--paradoxical as it may appearhas again and again leaped down his own throat."

From the earliest history of swine, they have been regarded as more subject to scrofula than any other animal. This disease, so peculiar to the hog, before it received a name, so far ante-dated the same disease in the human family, that when it did make its appearance in the latter, it was named after the Greek name of swine, as best expressing its character. There are various diseases peculiar to certain animals. Cats are subject to fits; dogs more than other animals, to hydrophobia; horses to glanders and heaves; the cow to consumption and hollow-horn; sheep to the rot; fowls to the gapes, swelled head, and blindness; and scrofula is the prevailing disease among swine. The diseases affecting other animals than swine, are usually such as to condemn them before they reach the shambles of the butcher; and the law treats with severity all venders of diseased meats, with the exception of pork dealers. This is partly because the scrofula of the hog cannot always be readily detected, and in a measure owing to the indifference of pork-eaters to the known presence of tubercles, tumors, etc., în pork. When man comes to be affected with hollow-horn and rot, beef and mutton must be more closely looked to! To what extent the flesh of various animals may be affected by the diseases to which they are subject can hardly be determined, but Professor Gamgee affirms "that one-fifth of the common meat of Great Britain-beef, veal, mutton and lamb-is diseased; while Professor Gerlach states that in Berlin at least as much diseased as healthy meat is consumed." It is apparent, however, that when scrofula may be communicated simply by habitual contact with a scrofulous person, the contact of scrofulous food with the mouth and stomach must inevitably inoculate the system of the imprudent eater. One fact regarding pork is well known to all physiologists. It is, with few exceptions, the most indigestible food that can be taken into the stomach.

Again, pork is charged with being wormy. It killed a great many persons in Germany, and not a few in other countries, including our own. Our consul, at Elsinore, wrote our Secretary of State all about it, and scientists, on both sides of the Atlantic, got out their microscopes, rubbed up their spectacles, and after examining the flesh of the arraigned porker, found he possessed imps of probably the same devils which were cast into his progenitors on the hill-side. The

Illustrations in Figs. 13 and 14, show how these fellows appear under the microscope. They are called Trichinæ, and the disease they produce in man is denominated Trichiniasis. The parasites are sc minute that they can make their way to any part of the system, and a writer who has witnessed their effects thus describes them :

"This perforation of parts by millions of microscopic worms, is attended with symptoms more or less violent, depending upon their numbers, and the strength and health of the victim. While passing the coats of the bowels, violent purging often arises, simulating arsenical poisoning, and many persons have been unjustly suspected of this crime, when persons eating food prepared for them have been thus alarmingly seized. As the worms make their way into the - muscle, pains like those of rheumatism, cramp, weakness, or entire loss of power, resembling paralysis ensue; and when the numbers of Trichinæ are large, wasting, exhaustion, and death follow. Persons escaping with a few of these disagreeable tenants, suffer in a smaller degree from similar symptoms, but gradually recover, and a small portion of their muscles, removed and magnified, reveal the Trichinæ arrived at their destination, and undergoing the various stages of calcareous encystment."

Trichiniasis took the form of an epidemic in some parts of Germany, in 1865, and handled a great many people on this side of the Atlantic very roughly. Cases occurred in this city, in portions of Pennsylvania, and extensively in the West, where the hog enters so largely into the diet of the people. A scientific investigating cominittee in Chicago, reported having found in twelve hundred hogs slaughtered, one in fifty-eight affected with a parasite; and the advice of that committee was, that in cooking pork the Trichinæ be thoroughly cooked to death! 160° Fahrenheit was thought sufficient to do this. (Cooked Trichinæ ought to be as good as the Hottentot's toasted caterpillar!) Other investigators contend that pork-eaters consume eighteen thousand of these microscopic parasites to every cubic inch of affected pork taken into the stomach, and that ten out of every fifty hogs are so affected, to which a newspaper facetiously responds:" If it be true that ten out of every fifty Western hogs are Trichinous when only four out of one hundred are so in Germany, where people are dying with Trichiniasis as with a pestilence, the cholera is nothing to apprehend beside this pork evil. To be eating microscopic worms by the million is no joking matter, even to the