A treatise on diet : with a view to establish, on practical grounds, a system of rules for the prevention and cure of the diseases incident to a disordered state of the digestive functions / by J.A. Paris.

John Ayrton Paris

Date:: 1829

Credit: A treatise on diet : with a view to establish, on practical grounds, a system of rules for the prevention and cure of the diseases incident to a disordered state of the digestive functions / by J.A. Paris. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$a rotten fish, or a stranded whale, at a considerable distance. 4. Dr. George Fordyce has urged a still more serious and conclusive objection to that hackneyed maxim—‘^that we ought to live naturally, ox\ such food as is presented to us by nature viz. that man has no natural food. It is decreed that he shall earn his bread by the sweat of his brow ; or, in other words, that he shall, by his industry, dis- cover substances from which he is to procure subsistence ; and that, if he cannot find such, he must cultivate and alter them from their natural state. There is scarcely a vegetable which we at present employ, that can be found growing naturally. Buffon states, that our wheat is a factitious pro- duction, raised to its present condition by the art of agriculture. Rice, rye, barley, or even oats, are not to be found wild ; that is to say, growing naturally in any part of the earth, but have been altered, by the industry of mankind, from plants not now resembling them even in such a degree as to enable us to recognise their relations. The acrid and disagreeable apium graveolens has been thus transformed into delicious celery ; and the cokwort, a plant of scanty leaves, not weighing altogether half an ounce, has been improved into cabbage, whose leaves alone weigh many pounds, or into a cauliflower of considerable dimensions, being only the embryo of a few buds, which, in their natural state, would not have weighed many grains. The$