Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. V, October, 1850, Volume I.

by Unknown

We will uphold London milk. Mr. Rugg says that it is apt to contain chalk, the brains of sheep, oxen, and cows, flour, starch, treacle, whiting, sugar of lead, arnotto, size, etc. Who cares for Mr. Rugg? London milk is better than country milk, for London cows are town cows. They live in a city, in close sheds, in our own dear alleys—are consumptive—they are delightful cows; only their milk is too strong, it requires watering and doctoring, and then it is delicious milk.

Tea we are not quite sure about. Some people say that because tea took so sudden a hold upon the human appetite, because it spread so widely in so short a time, that therefore it supplies a want: its use is natural. Liebig suggests that it supplies a constituent of bile. I think rather that its use has become general because it causes innocent intoxication. Few men are not glad to be made cheerful harmlessly. For this reason I think it is that the use of tea and coffee has become popular; and since whatever sustains cheerfulness advances health—the body working with good will under a pleasant master—tea does our service little good. In excess, no doubt, it can be rendered hurtful (so can bread and butter); but the best way of pressing it into employment, as an ægritudinary aid, is by the practice of taking it extremely hot. A few observations upon the temperature at which food is refused by all the lower animals, will soon convince you that in man—not as regards tea only, but in a great many respects—Art has established her own rule, and that the Appetite of Nature has been conquered.

We have a great respect for alcoholic liquors. It has been seen that the excess of these makes fat; they, therefore, who have least need of fat, according to our rules, are those who have most need of wine and beer.

Of ordinary meats there is not much to say, We have read of Dr. Beaumont's servant, who had an open musket-hole leading into his stomach, through which the doctor made experiments. Many experiments were made, and tables drawn of no great value on the digestibility of divers kinds of meat. Climate and habit are, on such points, paramount. Pig is pollution to the children of the Sun, the Jew, and Mussulman; but children of winter, the Scandinavians, could not imagine Paradise complete without it. Schrimner, the sacred hog, cut up daily and eaten by the tenants of Walhalla, collected his fragments in the night, and was in his sty again ready for slaughter the next morning. These things concern us little, for it is not with plain meat that we have here to do, but with the noble art of Cookery. That art, which once obeyed and now commands our appetite, which is become the teacher where it was the taught, we duly reverence. When ægritudinary science shall obtain its college, and when each Unhealthy Course shall have its eminent professor to teach Theory and Practice—then we shall have a Court of Aldermen for Patrons, a Gravedigger for Principal, and a Cook shall be Dean of Faculty.

VII. The Water Party.

Water rains from heaven, and leaps out of the earth; it rolls about the land in rivers, it accumulates in lakes; three-fourths of the whole surface of the globe is water; yet there are men unable to be clean. “God loveth the clean,” said Mahomet. He was a sanitary reformer; he was a notorious impostor; and it is our duty to resist any insidious attempt to introduce his doctrines.

There are in London districts of filth which speak to us—through the nose—in an emphatic manner. Their foul air is an atmosphere of charity; for we pass through it pitying the poor. Burke said of a certain miser to whom an estate was left, “that now, it was to be hoped, he would set up a pocket-handkerchief.” We hope, of the miserable, that when they come into their property they may be able to afford themselves a little lavender and musk. We might be willing to subscribe for the correction now and then, with aromatic cachou, of the town's bad breath; but water is a vulgar sort of thing, and of vulgarity the less we have the better.

In truth, we have not much of it. We are told that in a great city Water is maid of all work; has to assist our manufactures, to supply daily our saucepans and our tea-kettles; has to cleanse our clothes, our persons, and our houses; to provide baths, to wash our streets, and to flood away the daily refuse of the people, with their slaughter-houses, markets, hospitals, &c. Our dozen reservoirs in London yield a supply daily averaging thirty gallons to each head—which goes partly to make swamps, partly to waste, partly to rot, as it is used in tubs or cisterns. Rome in her pride used once to supply water at the rate of more than three hundred gallons daily to each citizen. That was excess. In London half a million of people get no water at all into their houses; but as those people live in the back settlements, and keep out of our sight, their dirt is no great matter of concern. We, for our own parts, have enough to cook with, have whereof to drink, wherewith to wash our feet sometimes, to wet our fingers and the corner of a towel—we inquire no further. Drainage and all such topics involve details positively nasty, and we blush for any of our fellow-citizens who take delight in chattering about them.

We are told to regard the habits of an infant world. London, the brain of a vast empire, is advised now to forget her civilization, and to go back some thousand years. We are to look at Persian aqueducts, attributed to Noah's great-grandson—at Carthaginians, Etruscans, Mexicans—at what Rome did. It frets us when we are thus driven to an obvious reply. Man in an unripe and half-civilized condition, has not found out the vulgarity of water; for his brutish instinct is not overcome. All savages believe that water is essential to their life and desire it in unlimited abundance. Cultivation teaches us another life, in which our animal existence neither gets nor merits much attention. As for the Romans, so perpetually quoted, it was a freak of theirs to do things massively. While they were yet almost barbarians, they built that Cloaca through which afterward Agrippa sailed down to the Tiber in a boat. Who wishes to see His Worship the Lord Mayor of London emerging in his state barge from a London sewer?

Now here is inconsistency. Thirty million gallons of corruption are added daily by our London sewers to the Thames: that is one object of complaint, good in itself, because we drink Thames water. But in the next breath it is complained that a good many million gallons more should be poured out; that there are three hundred thousand cesspools more to be washed up; that as much filth as would make a lake six feet in depth, a mile long, and a thousand feet across, lies under London stagnant; and they would wish this also to be swept into the river. I heard lately of a gentleman who is tormented with the constant fancy that he has a scorpion down his back. He asks every neighbor to put in his hand and fetch it out, but no amount of fetching out ever relieves him. That is a national delusion. Our enlightened public is much troubled with such scorpions. Sanitary writers are infested with them.