If the preceding explanation of the more rapid digestion of animal than of vegetable substances, and the higher stimulus which they afford be correct, the common notion of the former being more digestible than the latter _solely_ because there is a greater analogy between animal food and the system which it goes to nourish, and therefore a smaller change to be undergone, necessarily falls to the ground. If it be true--which it seems to be--that, _in the natural state_, in a temperate climate, animal food is more easily digested than vegetable, the fair inference ought rather to be that the system requires the former in larger proportion than the latter, and that the gastric juice is purposely constituted with reference to this circumstance. Accordingly, in the Arctic Regions, where the climate renders great stimulus necessary, animal food, of to us the most indigestible kind--that consisting of pure fat and oil--is eaten in immense quantities and digested with enviable facility; while in India and other tropical climates, where much less stimulus is required, the natives digest vegetable aliment with at least equal ease and satisfaction. If, as Dr Paris imagines, animal food owes its digestibility simply to its possessing “a composition analogous to that of the structure which it is designed to supply,” and therefore requiring “little more than division and depuration,” instead of the alleged “complicated series of decompositions and recompositions, which must be effected before vegetable matter can be animalized or assimilated to the body,”[32]--it follows that butcher-meat must in all climates and situations be more digestible than vegetables; and that _raw_ meat, which has the greatest analogy of all to the structure of the body, must require still less digestive power for its solution and assimilation than cooked meat. These propositions, however, are wholly at variance with experience: in particular, the effect of cooking is unquestionably to induce a change of composition subversive of the analogy on which Dr Paris rests his opinion.