Without the ministry of culinary fire, man could not gratify his carnivorous propensities. He would be obliged to content himself with a vegetable diet; for, according to the comparative anatomists, man is not structurally a flesh-eater. At any rate he is not fanged or clawed. His teeth and nails are not like the natural cutlery found in the mouths and paws of beasts of prey. He cannot eat raw flesh. Digger Indians are left to do that when the meat is putrescent. Prometheus was the inventor of roast and boiled beef, and of cookery generally, and therefore the destroyer of the original simplicity of living which characterized primitive man, when milk and fruits cooked by the sun, and acorns, were the standing repasts of unsophisticated humanity. _Per contra_, Horace makes man, in his mast-eating days, a poor creature. "Forth from the earth when human kind First crept, a dull and brutish herd, with nails And fists they fought for dens wherein to couch, and _acorns_." Don Quixote, however, in his eloquent harangue to the shepherds in the Sierra Morena, took a different view of man during the acorn period. He saw in it the golden age. There are vast rice-eating populations in China and India, who are a low grade of men, morally and physically. Exceptional cases of longevity, like those of old Parr, Jenkins, Francisco, Pratt, and Farnham, are often-times adduced as the results of abstemiousness and frugality of living. These exceptional cases prove nothing whatever. These individuals happened to reach an almost antediluvian longevity, thanks to their inherited vitality and their listless, uneventful, monotonous lives. Their hearts beat a dull funeral march through four or five generations, and finally stopped. But the longevity of such mighty thinkers and superb men as Humboldt and Goethe is glorious to contemplate. They were never old, but were vernal in spirit to the last, and, for aught that appears to the contrary, generous livers, not "acid ghouls" or bran-eating valetudinarians. Shakespeare died at fifty-one, but great thinkers and poets have generally been long-lived. "Better fifty years of Europe" or America "than a cycle of" rice-eating "Cathay."