The tribes that, settling, some fifteen hundred or two thousand years ago, in the regions of Europe surrounding the Baltic, brought with them the worship of Odin, were undoubtedly of Asiatic origin, and came probably from the banks of the Don, and the shores of the Black Sea. It is a curious confirmation of this opinion, that the eating of horseflesh prevailed among their descendants down to the eleventh century. Now such a custom could never have arisen spontaneously in a country like Germany, or Scandinavia, where the animal was comparatively scarce and valuable, but it must have existed from the earliest times in the inexhaustible pastures of the plains of Asia. It was practised at the religious feasts of the Pagan north, in commemoration of the original land of those who partook of the banquet, and was a token of adherence to the religion of Odin. In one of Pope Zachary’s letters to Saint Boniface, the great apostle of the Germans, he enjoins that pious missionary to prevent the eating of horseflesh; and St. Olaf, the cruel king, who converted the Scandinavians to Christianity by the sword, put to death or mutilated all who persisted in using that heathenish food. Odinism is now extinct, and no man can be tempted by hostility to Christianity to prefer horse-steaks to beef-steaks. Yet is it not very curious to find that neither a total change of religion, nor the lapse of seven centuries have quite extinguished the hereditary taste of the northern nations for such untempting viands? There has even sprung up in Germany, of late years, a society having for its object to encourage and promote the use of horseflesh for human food! The horse is the only animal slaughtered for the supply of the prisoners, in the house of correction in Copenhagen. Mr. Bremner, who courageously tasted both the soup and the _bouilli_, says, that the latter is “tough, like the worst kinds of beef, but by no means bad to eat, or disagreeable in taste, only dry and thready. Had we not been told, we should have taken it for the flesh of an ox ill fed.”