port before the fever?

I have said something upon this subject in "Zanzibar City,
Island, and Coast" (i. p. 180), it will bear repetition. Joseph
Dupuis justly remarks: "I am satisfied, from my own experience,
that many fall victims from the adoption of a course of training
improperly termed prudential; viz. a sudden change of diet from
ship's fare to a scanty sustenance of vegetable matter (rejecting
even a moderate proportion of wine), and seclusion in their
apartments from the sun and atmosphere."

An immense mass of nonsense, copied in one "authority" from
another, was thrown before the public by books upon diet, until
the "Physiology of Common Life" (George Henry Lewes) discussed
Liebig's brilliant error in considering food chemically, and not
physiologically. The rest assume his classification without
reserve, and work from the axiom that heat-making, carbonaceous
and non-nitrogenous foods (e.g. fat and sugars), necessary to
support life in the arctic and polar regions, must be exchanged
for the tissue-making, plastic or nitrogenous (vegetables), as we
approach the equator. They are right as far as the southern
temperates, their sole field of observation; they greatly err in
all except the hot, dry parts of the tropics. Why, a Hindoo will
drink at a sitting a tumbler of gli (clarified butter), and the
European who would train for wrestling after the fashion of
Hindostan, as I attempted in my youth, on "native" sweetmeats and
sugared milk, will be blind with "melancholia" in a week. The
diet of the negro is the greasiest possible, witness his "palm-
oil chop" and "palaver sauce;" his craving for meat, especially
fat meat, is a feeling unknown to Europe. And how simple the