UNCULTIVATED FOODS.

Heat and light—each is necessary for our bodily comfort and well-being. We have seen that much time and thought have been spent during the past three hundred years in providing the most satisfactory methods for heating and lighting our houses. We have found that wood and coal in our fireplaces, stoves, and furnaces have given us the best heat. We have learned that kerosene and gas made from coal are the most common sources of light. Even electricity, the latest means for producing light and heat, usually needs the power of steam for its development; and heat is necessary to produce steam. We have a common name for the wood, the coal, the gas, and the oil, from the burning of which heat and light result; this name is fuel.

Another form of fuel is even more necessary than coal and wood. In the winter we warm our rooms so that we may not suffer from the cold; but the stove does not warm us when out of doors. Then we put on our heavy winter wraps, but these give us no warmth: they merely keep in the heat of the body or keep out the cold blasts of the wind. We all know that the body is warm of itself; that there is something within us that produces heat, like a fire. When our fingers become chilled by the frosty air we may warm them with our breath. The temperature of a room may be seventy degrees or less, but if we place the bulb of a thermometer beneath the tongue we shall find that the mercury rises to ninety-eight degrees.

The fire in the body and the fire in the stove act very much alike. If the draughts of the stove are closed tight and no air is admitted, the fire dies down and goes out. If the air which enters the body is foul, the fire feels the effect and our health is injured. If the lungs are filled with water or anything else which keeps out the air, the fire goes out and life is lost.

The fuel which we call food is just as necessary for the fire in our body as is wood or coal for the fire in the stove. Three times a day or oftener we take this food-fuel into our bodies; thus we keep the fire steadily burning which makes us warm and keeps us alive.

On the other hand, fuel for the body must be very different from fuel for a stove. In the stove heat alone is wanted; therefore one form of fuel is enough. In the body bones must be enlarged and strengthened, muscles must be developed, fat must be provided in sufficient quantities, and brain-matter must be produced. Therefore the food-fuel must provide not only heat but also the different materials of which the body is made. One kind of food is necessary for the bones, another for the blood, another for the flesh, and another for the nerves. Thus while in studying common fuel we have only to learn about wood, either in the form of trees or pressed into the form of coal, in studying food-fuel we find that the kinds are almost numberless. Meat and vegetables, fish and fruit, roots and nuts, in their infinite varieties, are all included in the word food.

We are told that all matter belongs to one of three kingdoms—the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral kingdoms. From two of these three divisions we obtain most of our food. Food may be divided into two classes then—animal food and vegetable food. In animal food we have the meat of wild animals and of domestic animals. In early days, when the number of people was small, the supply of wild animals was large. A great part of the food in those days was obtained by hunting and fishing. To-day most of the meat comes from domestic animals, so that the keeping of herds and flocks is one of the great industries of the time. Fish are still important in our lists of foods, but the flesh of wild animals is less and less used for meat.

Three hundred years ago the Indians had this country to themselves. They were few in number and were scattered over a vast territory. The forests abounded in wild game and the lakes and rivers were filled with fish. Love of hunting and fishing held the first place in the pleasures of the red man. The hunting grounds extended far and wide in every direction. Each tribe had its own hunting and fishing grounds, and it was considered an act of war for any tribe of Indians to encroach upon the territory of other tribes.

"Such places as they chose for their abode," says Hubbard's History, "were usually at the falls of great rivers, or near the seaside, where was any convenience for catching such fish as every summer and winter used to come up the coast. At such times they used, like good fellows, to make all common, and then those who had entertained their neighbors at the seaside expected the like kindness from them again up higher in the country."

The kinds of wild animals that the Indians hunted were very numerous. One man describes the appearance of an Indian's "room of skins." He says: "There they showed me many hides and horns, both beasts of chase of the stinking foot—such as roes, foxes, jackals, wolves, wildcats, raccoons, porcupines, skunks, muskrats, squirrels, and sables—and beasts of chase of the sweet foot—buck, red deer, reindeer, moose, bear, beaver, otter, hare, and martin." Captain John Smith tells of the fowl that the red men hunted. He mentions eagles, hawks, cranes, geese, ducks, sheldrakes, teal, gulls, and turkeys.

The variety of fish caught by the Indians was also very large. "Higher up at the falls of the great rivers they used to take salmon, shad, and alewives, that used in great quantities, more than cartloads, in the spring, to pass up into the fresh-water ponds and lakes." "In March, April, May, and half June," says John Smith, "here is cod in abundance; in May, June, July, and August, mullet and sturgeon; herring, if any desire them; I have taken many." Again he writes of whales, grampuses, hake, haddock, mackerel, sharks, cunners, bass, perch, eels, crabs, lobsters, mussels, and oysters.

We may also divide vegetable food into two classes—that which nature provides without the aid of man, or wild vegetables, and that which requires cultivation, or cultivated vegetables. Many forms of nuts, berries and fruits, and some forms of common ground vegetables grow wild. The red men found these in great abundance.

John Smith found in New England currants, mulberries, gooseberries, plums, walnuts, chestnuts, and strawberries, besides other fruits of which he did not know the names. He made a journey up the Potomac River, and reported that the hills yielded no less plenty and variety of fruit than the river furnished abundance of fish.

Smith also described acorns whose bark was white and sweetish; he added that these acorns, when boiled, afforded a sweet oil that the red men kept in gourds to anoint their heads and joints. The Indians also ate the fruit of this acorn, made into bread. There were plums of three kinds and cherries. Smith discovered also a great abundance of vines "that climb the tops of the highest trees in some places. Where they are not overshadowed from the sun, they are covered with fruit, though never pruned nor manured."

Hunting and fishing are carried on in much the same way to-day as they were centuries ago. The gun has taken the place of the bow and arrow, and fishing implements have been somewhat improved. But to capture and kill is now, as formerly, all that is needed to obtain this form of food, if the wild animals themselves can be found. Wild vegetables may be gathered to-day in just the way that our ancestors gathered them, though they are not found in so great quantities because of the increase of cultivation. In studying the changes in the modes of living that have occurred in this country during the last three hundred years, we find that almost all the improvements in the production of food have been in the planting, cultivating, and harvesting of food, and the bringing it to market.