"There is nothing more general in life than the digestive apparatus, because matter is the largest, if not the greatest, fact in the material universe. Every creature which is here must be made of something, and be maintained by something, or must be landlord of itself.... The planetary dinner-table has its various latitudes and longitudes, and plant and animal and mineral and wine are grown around it, and set upon it, according to the map of taste in the spherical appetite of our race.... Hunger is the child of cold and night, and comes upwards from the all-swallowing ground; but thirst descends from above, and is born of the solar rays.... Hunger and thirst are strong terms, and the things themselves are too feverish provocations for civilized man. They are incompatible with the sense of taste in its epicureanism, and their gratification is of a very bodily order. The savage man, like a boa-constrictor, would swallow his animals whole, if his gullet would let him. This is to cheat the taste with unmanageable objects, as though we should give an estate to a child. On the other hand, civilization, house-building, warm apartments and kitchen fires, well-stored larders, and especially exemption from rude toil, abolish these extreme caricatures; and keeping appetite down to a middling level by the rote of meals, and thus taking away the incentives to ravenous haste, they allow the mind to tutor and variegate the tongue, and to substitute the harmonies and melodies of deliberate gustation for such unseemly bolting. Under this direction, hunger becomes polite; a long-drawn, many-colored taste; the tongue, like a skilful instrument, holds its notes; and thirst, redeemed from drowning, rises from the throat to the tongue and lips, and, full of discrimination, becomes the gladdening love of all delicious flavors.... In the stomach, judging by what there is done, what a scene we are about to enter! What a palatial kitchen and more than monasterial refectory! The sipping of aromatic nectar, the brief and elegant repast of that Apicius, the tongue, are supplanted at this lower board by eating and drinking in downright earnest. What a variety of solvents, sauces, and condiments, both springing up at call from the blood, and raining down from the mouth into the natural patines of the meats! What a quenching of desires, what an end and goal of the world is here! No wonder; for the stomach sits for four or five assiduous hours at the same meal that the dainty tongue will despatch in a twentieth portion of the time. For the stomach is bound to supply the extended body, while the tongue wafts only fairy gifts to the close and spiritual brain." So far Wilkinson, the Milton of physiologists.