Vegetable substances used for the food of man / by Dr. Lankester. With illustrations.

  • Lankester, Edwin, 1814-1874.
Date:
[1850?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vegetable substances used for the food of man / by Dr. Lankester. With illustrations. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sure and opportunity for cultivating the social and kindly affections. It is not until men have placed themselves beyond that state of merely physical ex- istence wherein the plenty of to-day may be followed by the destitution of to-morrow, that the higher fa- culties and feelings of our nature can be expandea. ‘It must certainly, therefore, be matter of more than common interest to obtain some knowledge of those vegetable substances through the cultivation of which man has been enabled to localize himself, to reap and to store up harvests; and by thus becoming freed from an incessant call upon his physical energies for the supply of his necessities, to acquire the motives and the means for becoming something higher and better in the scale of being. Vegetables form the primary source of sustenance to everything that lives. Were the earth without them and bare—and but for cultivation how much of it would be in that state—the effects of heat and cold, of drought and rain, would be so violent, that apart from ali considerations as to food, the whole world would speedily become uninhabitable. Frosts and drought would break, and the returning water would wash away the surface, until the whole would become one wide and swampy waste. ‘The presence of vegetation prevents this desolating action, and converts what otherwise would be destructive agents, into ministers of abundance. No vegetable produc- tions tend so much to bring about this beneficial result as those which are cultivated for human food. By the shade which they afford to the ground in the hot season, they check that evaporation, and prevent that excessive hardening of the surface, which, in an exposed wild, render the soil impervious and inert ; while, on the. other hand, the humidity which they imbibe during the rainy season is again given out by continual and gradual evaporation, and they minister