the "Archaeologia" by Mr. Peacock, cover much of the ground which had
been scarcely traversed before by any scientific English inquirer. The
importance of an insight into the culinary economy of the Romans lies
in the obligations under which the more western nations of Europe are
to it for nearly all that they at first knew upon the subject. The
Romans, on their part, were borrowers in this, as in other, sciences
from Greece, where the arts of cookery and medicine were associated,
and were studied by physicians of the greatest eminence; and to Greece
these mysteries found their way from Oriental sources. But the school
of cookery which the Romans introduced into Britain was gradually
superseded in large measure by one more agreeable to the climate and
physical demands of the people; and the free use of animal food, which
was probably never a leading feature in the diet of the Italians as
a community, and may be treated as an incidence of imperial luxury,
proved not merely innocuous, but actually beneficial to a more
northerly race.

So little is to be collected--in the shape of direct testimony, next
to nothing--of the domestic life of the Britons--that it is only by
conjecture that one arrives at the conclusion that the original diet
of our countrymen consisted of vegetables, wild fruit, the honey of
wild bees--which is still extensively used in this country,--a coarse
sort of bread, and milk. The latter was evidently treated as a very
precious article of consumption, and its value was enhanced by the
absence of oil and the apparent want of butter. Mr. Ferguson supposes,
from some remains of newly-born calves, that our ancestors sacrificed
the young of the cow rather than submit to a loss of the milk; but it
was, on the contrary, an early superstition, and may be, on obvious
grounds, a fact, that the presence of the young increased the yield
in the mother, and that the removal of the calf was detrimental. The