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Dicæarchus (as related by St. Jerome in his books on Grecian antiquities), no man ate flesh, but all lived upon fruits and pulse. Virgil alludes to this era as universally believed in. Our own poets, Pope and Thomson, join their voices on the same side. In Pope's "Essay on Man," epistle iii., 147, we read:—
Nor think, in Nature's state they blindly trod:
The state of Nature was the reign of God.
Self-love and social at her birth began—
Union the bond of all things, and of man.
Pride then was not, nor arts, that pride to aid:
Man walk'd with beast, joint tenant of the shade.
The same his table, and the same his bed;
No murder cloth'd him, and no murder fed.
In the same temple—the resounding wood—
All vocal beings hymn'd their equal God.
The shrine with gore unstain'd, with gold undrest,—
Unbrib'd, unbloody stood the blameless priest.
Heaven's attribute was universal care,
And man's prerogative to rule, but spare.
Ah! how unlike the man of times to come,
Of half that live, the butcher and the tomb!
Who—foe to Nature—hears the general groan,
Murders their species, and betrays his own.
But just disease to luxury succeeds.
And every death its own avenger breeds.
The fury-passions from that blood began,
And turned on man a fiercer savage—man.
Similar to this is the language of Thomson, in reference to the same period. Speaking of herbs, he says:—
But who their virtues can declare? Who pierce
With vision pure into their secret stores
Of health and life and joy?—the food of man.
While yet he liv'd in innocence, and told
A length of golden years, unflesh'd in blood,
A stranger to the savage arts of life,
Death, rapine, carnage, surfeit, and disease—
The lord, and not the tyrant of the world.—(Spring, 233.)
This primeval state of innocence and bliss did not long continue. Man forsook the way of peace, and is no longer a fit inhabitant of Paradise. After his transgression, he could no longer enjoy abmidance of delicious fruit, except as the result of industry, and even then he would frequently have to derive his subsistence from roots, corn, and other farinaceous or succulent vegetables.
A similar belief concerning the primitive food of man prevailed among the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, and the Chaldeans, as we have reason to believe from Sanchoniathon, from Manetho, and
