This wide diffusion of the species, occupying every variety of climate, soil, and situation, necessarily involves the fact of man being omnivorous, or able to derive support from all kinds of aliment; for otherwise, if the nourishment depended exclusively upon animal or vegetable food, various regions where the race exists and multiplies would be incompatible with the easy maintenance of human life. In the cold and frozen north, beyond the range of the cereal plants, where excessive poverty marks the only vegetation that appears, the tribes of Esquimaux draw their support entirely from the land and marine animals, principally from fish and seals; and this is also the case with the miserable Petcheres, inhabiting a corresponding district in the southern hemisphere, the chill and barren shores of Tierra del Fuego. On the other hand, the condition of many interior tropical countries is not propitious to the subsistence of an extended population of the domestic animals and the common cerealia, owing to the number of the beasts of prey and the interchange of a flooded and a parching soil; and there we find large families of men chiefly sustained by a peculiar farinaceous diet, the fruits of the plantain and the palm. In the temperate zone, a plentiful supply of both animal and vegetable food is met with, which mingle in the aliment of the inhabitants. Thus, as we approach the poles, man does not live by bread at all, the Esquimaux being unacquainted with it; while approaching the equator he is mainly supported by vegetable nutriment; and intermediate between them, he is strikingly omnivorous, various kinds of grain and flesh composing the staff of life. Some naturalists have proposed a classification of mankind, according to the species of food by the use of which they are distinguished. Thus we have _carnivorous_, or flesh-eaters; _Ichthyophagists_, or fish-eaters; _Frugivorous_, or fruit and corn-eaters; _Acridophagists_, or locust-eaters; _Geophagists_, or earth-eaters; _Anthropophagists_, or man-eaters; and _Omnivorous_, or devourers of every thing. But we have no tribes of men that exclusively belong to any one of these classes. The only clear division that can be made of the human race, taking their food as a characteristic, is the very general one already stated, between the inhabitants of polar, temperate, and tropical regions; and growing intercommunication is constantly lessening the amount of difference even here, by transporting the aliment yielded in abundance in one district to another naturally destitute of it. The locust-eaters include some of the wandering Arabs of northern Africa and western Asia, where the crested locust, one of the largest species of the tribe, is made use of for food, both fresh and salted; in which last state it is sold in some of the markets of the Levant. Morier, in his Second Journey to Persia, observes, that locusts are sold at Bushire as food, to the lowest of the peasantry, when dried;