How plain a language is spoken by all this!  Prometheus (who represents the human race) effected some great change in the condition of his nature, and applied fire to culinary purposes; thus inventing an expedient for screening from his disgust the horrors of the shambles.  From this moment his vitals were devoured by the vulture of disease.  It consumed his being in every shape of its loathsome and infinite variety, inducing the soul-quelling sinkings of premature and violent death.  All vice rose from the ruin of healthful innocence.  Tyranny, superstition, commerce, and inequality were then first known, when reason vainly attempted to guide the wanderings of exacerbated passion.  I conclude this part of the subject with an extract from Mr. Newton’s “Defence of Vegetable Regimen”, from whom I have borrowed this interpretation of the fable of Prometheus.

’Making allowance for such transposition of the events of the allegory as time might produce after the important truths were forgotten, which this portion of the ancient mythology was intended to transmit, the drift of the fable seems to be this:—­Man at his creation was endowed with the gift of perpetual youth; that is, he was not formed to be a sickly suffering creature as we now see him, but to enjoy health, and to sink by slow degrees into the bosom of his parent earth without disease or pain.  Prometheus first taught the use of animal food (primus bovem occidit Prometheus (Plin.  “Nat.  Hist”. lib. 7 sect. 57.)) and of fire, with which to render it more digestible and pleasing to the taste.  Jupiter, and the rest of the gods, foreseeing the consequences of these inventions, were amused or irritated at the short-sighted devices of the newly-formed creature, and left him to experience the sad effects of them.  Thirst, the necessary concomitant of a flesh diet’ (perhaps of all diet vitiated by culinary preparation), ’ensued; water was resorted to, and man forfeited the inestimable gift of health which he had received from heaven:  he became diseased, the partaker of a precarious existence, and no longer descended slowly to his grave. ("Return to Nature”.  Cadell, 1811.)

But just disease to luxury succeeds,
And every death its own avenger breeds;
The fury passions from that blood began,
And turned on man a fiercer savage—­man.

Man, and the animals whom he has infected with his society, or depraved by his dominion, are alone diseased.  The wild hog, the mouflon, the bison, and the wolf; are perfectly exempt from malady, and invariably die either from external violence or natural old age.  But the domestic hog, the sheep, the cow, and the dog, are subject to an incredible variety of distempers; and, like the corruptors of their nature, have physicians who thrive upon their miseries.  The supereminence of man is like Satan’s, a supereminence of pain; and the majority of his species, doomed to penury, disease, and crime, have reason to curse the untoward