Among the infinite variety of remedies and prescriptions, in the human _Materia Medica_, the astounded Houyhnhnm learns, are reckoned “serpents, toads, frogs, spiders, dead men’s flesh and bones, birds, beasts, fishes”--no mere travellers’ tales (it is perhaps necessary to explain), but sober fact, as any one may discover for himself by an examination of some of the received and popular medical treatises of the seventeenth century, in which the most absurd “prescriptions,” involving the most frightful cruelty, are recorded with all seriousness:-- “My master, continuing his discourse, said there was nothing that rendered the Yahoos more odious than their undistinguishing appetite to devour everything that came in their way, whether herbs, roots, berries, the _corrupted flesh of animals, or all mingled together_; and that it was peculiar in their temper that they were fonder of what they could get by rapine or stealth at a greater distance than much better food provided for them at home. If their prey held out, they would eat till they were ready to burst.” Although unaccustomed to the better living, and finding it “insipid at first,” the human slave of the Houyhnhnm (a word which, by the way, in that language, means “the perfection of nature”) records as the result of his experience, in the first place, how little will sustain human life; and, in the second place, the fact of the superior healthfulness of the vegetable food.[148] About this period or a little earlier, Philippe Hecquet, a French physician, published his _Traité des Dispenses du Carême_ (“Treatise on Dispensations in Lent”), 1709, in which he gave in his adhesion to the principles of Vegetarianism--at all events, so far as health is concerned. He is mentioned by Voltaire, and is supposed to be the original of the doctor Sangrado of Le Sage.[149] If this conjecture have any truth, the author of _Gil Blas_ is open to the grave charge of misrepresentation, of sacrificing truth to effect, or (what is still worse and still more common) of pandering to popular prejudices.[150] XXI. THOMSON. 1700-1748. In the long and terrible series of the Ages the distinguishing glory of the eighteenth century is its _Humanitarianism_--not visible, indeed, in legislation or in the teaching of the ordinarily-accredited guides of the public faith and morals, but proclaimed, nevertheless, by the great prophets of that era. As far as ordinary life was concerned, the last age is only too obnoxious to the charge of selfishness and heartlessness. Callousness to suffering, as regards the non-human species in particular, is sufficiently apparent in the common amusements and “pastimes” of the various grades of the community.