Thus the habitual manner in which digestion is performed or affected, makes us either sad, gay, taciturn, gossiping morose or melancholy, without our being able to doubt the fact, or to resist it for a moment.
In this respect, humanity may be arranged under three categories; the regular, the reserved, and the uncertain.
Each of the persons who belong to each of the series, not only have similar dispositions, and propensities, but there is something analagous and similar in the manner in which they fulfill the mission from which chance during their lives has separated them.
To exhibit an example, I will go into the vast field of literature. I think men of letters frequently owe all their characteristics to their peculiar mode of life. Comic poets must be of one kind, tragic poets of another, and elegiac, of the uncertain class. The most elegiac and the most comic are only separated by a variety of digestive functions.
By an application of this principle to courage, when Prince Eugene of Savoy, was doing the greatest injury to France, some one said, "Ah, why can I not send him a pate de foie gras, three times a week I would make him the greatest sluggard of Europe."
"Let us hurry our men into action, while a little beef is left in their bowels," said an English general.
Digestion in the young is very often accompanied by a slight chill, and in the old, by a great wish to sleep. In the first case, nature extracts the coloric from the surface to use it in its laboratory. In the second, the same power debilitated by age cannot at once satisfy both digestion and the excitement of the senses.
When digestion has just begun, it is dangerous to yield to a disposition for mental work. One of the greatest causes of mortality is, that some men after having dined, and perhaps too well dined, can neither close their eyes nor their ears.
This observation contains a piece of advice, which should even attract the most careless youth, usually attentive to nothing. It should also arrest the attention of grown men, who forget nothing, not even that time never pauses, and which is a penal law to those on the wrong side of fifty.
Some persons are fretful while digestion is going on. At that time, nothing should be suggested to and no favors asked of them.