peculiar organization, to make their repast; until either scarcity, change of climate, or other causes, reduced them to the necessity of adopting a diet less congenial to their nature, and less conductive to their happiness.
CHAPTER IV.
PREPARATION OF ANIMALS FOR FOOD.
41. That man has succeeded, by art, in making the flesh of other animals agreeable to the senses of sight, smell, and taste;—that he has rendered it also both digestible and nutritious,5 cannot be questioned; but the comparative advantages of this and a vegetable diet will be more fully considered hereafter; my present arguments merely applying to a state of society far antecedent to the discovery of fire, and the invention of cooking and culinary utensils.
[Note 5. This proposition cannot be admitted without qualification. It may be questioned whether any form of cooking can render flesh-meat more nutritious or digestible in the absolute sense. It is very true that many persons in civilized society have artificial or decayed teeth, neither of which are well adapted to the mastication of raw flesh; hence, with such persons, cooked flesh well masticated might digest more comfortably than uncooked flesh with little or no mastication. Again, the revolting appearance of raw flesh might, when first presented to the senses of taste and smell, so disturb and nauseate the stomach as to seriously impair for a time the digestive functions. But I am of opinion that raw flesh, well masticated, would prove as much more nutritious and digestible than cooked in the case of the human, as it is with the lower animals, after the senses had been thoroughly accustomed to it. T.]
42. How soon man became acquainted with fire and its various uses, neither sacred nor profane history assists us in determining. Cain and Abel brought offerings unto the Lord, but there is no allusion to their using fire; nor are we justified by any expression made use of on that occasion in inferring that this element was then employed to consume the offerings. The first mention of it occurs, I believe, when Abraham was about to offer up his son Isaac, long after the Flood, and when flesh was allowed as an
