“As for use in eating, it is with us as with them, natural and without instruction. Who doubts that a child, arrived at the necessary strength for feeding itself, could find its own nourishment? The earth produces and offers to him enough for his needs without artificial labour, and if not for all seasons, neither does she for the other races--witness the provisions which we observe the ants and others collecting for the sterile seasons of the year. Those nations whom we have lately discovered [the peoples of Hindustan and of parts of America], so abundantly furnished with natural meat and drink without care and without labour, have just instructed us that bread is not our sole food, and that without toil our mother Nature has furnished us with every plant we need, to shew us, as it seems, how superior she is to all our _artificiality_; while the extravagance of our appetite outruns all the inventions by which we seek to satisfy it.”[116] XIV. GASSENDI. 1592-1655. Gassendi, one of the most eminent men, and, what is more to the purpose, the most meritorious philosophic writer of France in the seventeenth century, claims the unique honour of being the first directly to revive in modern times the teaching of Plutarch and Porphyry. Other minds, indeed, of a high order, like More and Montaigne, had, as already shown, implicitly condemned the inveterate barbarism. But Gassendi is the writer who first, since the extinction of the Platonic philosophy, expressly and unequivocally attempted to enlighten the world upon this fundamental truth.