Spallanzani endeavoured to prove that the pebbles and gravel swallowed by various birds were of no use in the process of digestion; but Hunter, who had found two hundred pebbles in the gizzard of a turkey, and one thousand in that of a goose, demonstrated their utility in the trituration of their food, since these birds were found to be unable to digest, and consequently to thrive upon their nourishment when deprived of this mechanical aid. It is curious that the owl, which easily digests meat and bones, cannot be made to digest bread or grain, and yet dies if confined to animal food. The eagle, and other birds of prey, can dissolve both. A singular process of digestion is observed in the stormy petrel, which lives entirely on oil and fat substances whenever it can obtain them; but when fed with other articles of food, Nature, true to her laws, converts them into oil; the bird still discharges pure oil at objects that offend him, and feeds his young with the same substance. The petrel must, no doubt, be a bilious subject, for he delights in misery, and his presence is a sure presage of foul weather to the experienced seamen; and when
The wrathful skies
Gallow the very wanderers of the dark,
And make them keep their caves,
he is seen riding triumphantly on the whirlwind, and skimming the deepest chasms of the angry waves. This bird is said to be named ‘petrel’ from Peter, since, like that saint, he is supposed to have the power of walking on the waters.
The singular appetites which have been noticed seem to have been individual peculiarities, uninfluenced by a morbid condition; but there are cases in which a depraved appetite is symptomatic of disease, where we see persons otherwise possessed of sound judgment longing, not only for the most improper and indigestible food, but for substances of the most extraordinary and even disgusting nature. Thus we have seen patients, more especially young females and pregnant women, devouring dirt, cinders, spiders, leeches, hair, tallow, and paper. An ingenious writer affirms that “more literature in the form of paper and printed books has been thus devoured, than by the first scholars in Christendom.”
Dr. Darwin tells us that he saw a young lady about ten years of age that used to fill her stomach with earth out of a flowerpot, and then vomited it up, with small stones, bits of wood, and wings of various insects. John Hunter has described an endemic disease among the Africans in Jamaica, in which they devoured dirt. Mason Good, when speaking of this affection, says, “that the longing for such materials is, in this disease, a mere symptom, and rarely shows itself till the frame is completely exhausted by atrophy, dropsy, and hectic fever, brought on by a longing of a much more serious kind,—a longing to return home, a pining for the relations, the scenes, the kindnesses the domestic joys, of which the miserable sufferers have been robbed by barbarians less humanized than themselves, and which they have been forced or trepanned to resign for the less desirable banquet of whips, and threats, and harness, and hunger.”
Roderic à Castro relates the case of a lady who could eat twenty pounds of pepper, and another who lived upon ice. Tulpius mentions a woman who, during her pregnancy, longed for salt herrings, and ate fourteen hundred at the rate of five herrings per diem. Longius affirms that a lady in Cologne, who was in that state that ladies wish to be who love their lords, took such a fancy to taste the flesh of her husband that she actually assassinated him, and, after indulging in as much fresh meat as the weather permitted, salted the remainder for further use. This cannibal inclination seems not to be uncommon. The said Roderic à Castro knew a woman in the same thriving condition, who felt an inexpressible desire for a bit of the shoulder of a neighbouring baker, and her husband was persecuted by her constant prayers and lamentations to prevail on the worthy man to allow her one bite for charity’s sake: but the first bite was so heartily inflicted, that the crusty baker would not submit to a second.
In the Philosophical Transactions there is a case related of a woman whose fancies were not quite so solid, and who used to gratify her aerial appetites by putting the nozle of a bellows down her throat, and blowing away until she was tired. These longings of parturient women are most common; but it is rather curious, that, among our negroes in the West Indies, the husbands pretend to long for their wives, and endeavour to gratify them by proxy. Possibly such might have been the fancy of Cambes, the Lydian prince, who, according to Ælian, took it into his head one night to eat up his beloved wife.
CAUSES OF INSANITY.
Madness is attributed to moral and physical causes. Physicians do not agree as to the prevalence of either of these sources of human misery. Some of them, most unjustly accused of materialism, seem to lean to the opinion that, generally speaking, physical causes can be traced in post mortem examination; while others, equally skilled in accurate anatomical investigations, maintain that these organic derangements are very seldom met with.