B., page 80. Mr. William Barnard Boddy on “Diet and Cholera”: “The nourishment we derive from the flesh of some animals is not so compatible with the well-being of our constitutional wants as others, particularly the swine, which was altogether prohibited by the Jewish lawgiver, independent of its spiritual enactments, because it produced ‘leprosy.’ Now pork is largely consumed in England, especially by the poorer classes, and in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred is almost invariably succeeded by diarrhœa; and we need not be surprised at this when we look at the filthy habits of this animal; its impure feeding and liability to the diseases of measles and scarlet-fever. But when we know that they are often in this state killed and sold as an article of food, the liability to disease of course is much greater. But this is not all, as relates to this class of society, for almost—I might say positively so—every article upon which they subsist is impoverished by vile adulterations, and worse, putrefactions; their limited means enabling them to procure only the half-decomposed refuse of the vegetable market, and the half-tainted meat from the butchers’ shambles. “The more wealthy command all the luxuries of life in abundance, and, agreeable to their inclinations and appetites, feast accordingly. Over-indulgence however, often repeated, at last exhausts the healthy tone of the stomach, and blunts the keen edge of desire; and in order to produce a false appetite, condiments of various kinds and degrees are substituted; so that, in fact, the food becomes nearly as vitiated by these additions as that of the poor man’s by subtractions—the one of necessity, the other of choice. Extremes meet, and here ‘the rich and poor meet together;’ for under both circumstances the animal economy must severely suffer, and the ‘blood, which is the life,’ becomes weak and serous; and though for a time, from the great reluctance health has to depart, the growing evils of an impure and unwholesome diet may not be perceived or apprehended, yet insensibly, from the perpetual inroads made upon the constitution, and the delicate seat of life, the efforts to resist disease become weaker and weaker, till at last the whole mass is left without any internal active principle of sound health available to resist or overcome its effects.” THE END. BAILLIÈRE, TINDALL & COX, 20, KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND. FOOTNOTES: [1] The saliva, besides containing water, ptyaline, fatty matter, and albumen, holds in solution chloride of sodium and potassium, besides the sulphate of soda and the phosphates of lime and magnesia. The amount secreted during twenty-four hours has been estimated at from two to three pints. [2] Their food, according to geologists, consisted solely of shell-fish.