Does the Bavarian take to beer as the bee to honey?  Does instinct or appetite in general shape itself to climate and other outward circumstances?  This is but partly true.  As Nature has distributed noxious vegetable and animal substances through land and sea, which must be avoided, so man may not pitch or pour indiscriminately into his stomach whatever substance may be cooked or liquid distilled and offered to him, and we are thrown back upon the direct test of their innocent or noxious properties, with full responsibility of action; but still I have a profound conviction that all such general production of the chief articles of food and drink has its origin in some deeply felt necessity of human nature in their particular localities;—­the people may be on the wrong track in their attempts to provide for such necessities, but that these are felt and are the stimulus to the production is beyond doubt.

Allowing for the changes wrought by time and cultivation, we can still perceive the truth of what Tacitus wrote of Germany almost two thousand years ago:—­“The land, though somewhat varied in aspect, is in the main deformed with dismal forests and foul marshes.  The part next to Gaul is wetter, and that next to Pannonia and Noricum higher and more windy.  It is sufficiently productive, but not adapted to fruit-trees.”  The whole country lies in a high latitude,—­Munich, though in the southern part, being forty-eight degrees North.  No large city on the continent lies at such an elevation,—­about eighteen hundred feet above the level of the Adriatic.  In the midst of a vast plain, it is exposed to all winds.  Its site and the surrounding country are a great gravel-bed, hundreds of feet thick, a deposit from the Alps, spurs of which are within thirty miles on the south, subjecting the whole region to sudden changes of weather ranging in a few hours through many degrees of Fahrenheit.  The air is raw and chilly, and although many parts of Germany have since the days of Tacitus developed an adaptation to the vine and other fruits, none flourish in the neighborhood of Munich.  The whole country suffers from deficiency of nourishing and stimulating food.  They may not themselves know it, but this is true of the peasants who are best to do in the world.  Of the peasantry of Upper Bavaria, some have meat five times in the year, on their chief holidays,—­namely, Shrove Tuesday, Easter, Whitsuntide, Church-Consecration, and Christmas; some have it on but two of these days, and some only at Christmas.  The exceptions may be many, and the large cities are quite exceptional, but the change is of late introduction.  When people must labor upon such a diet, they feel the lack of something; but the Bavarians have been too long in this case to think of crying, like Israel of old in the wilderness, after having left the abundance of Egypt, “Who shall give us flesh to eat?”—­they attempt rather to allay the gnawings at their stomachs by potations of beer, and the appetite grows by what it feeds on.