the reign of George the Second. It used
to be jocularly said of him, that "his common
food is brimstone and fire, which he
licks up as eagerly as a hungry peasant
would a mess of pottage; and such is his
passion for this terrible element, that if he
were to come hungry into your kitchen
while a sirloin was roasting, he would eat
up the fire and leave the beef." Some of
the former paragraphs in this article
contain incidental notices of persons swallowing
mineral substances of various kinds;
and it appears that medical men recognise
a disease called lithophagy, or stone-eating.
Persons have been known to devour,
not merely spiders and flies, toads and
serpents, and other living creatures—
not merely cotton, hair, paper, and wood
but cinders, sand, earth, clay, chalk, flint,
glass, stone, musket-bullets, and earthenware.
One man could swallow billiard-balls
and gold and silver watches. There
is an accredited case in the medical
journals of New York for 1822, of a man
who could swallow clasp knives with
impunity; but on one day he overshot the
mark, by swallowing fourteen: it killed
him. If we would go into the particulars
of all these kinds of voracity, we should
have to establish three grades—digesting
without mastication; swallowing without
digesting; and simply swallowing without
either mastication or digestion. But everyone
can trace this matter for himself. As
to earth-eating, the young women of certain
lands are said to eat chalk and clay, to
improve their complexions.

Cases have been known in which the
limitation to the quantity of food taken
at once is brought about rather by the
effects of fumes and vapours upon the
brain than by an exhaustion of the
deglutitory powers of the eater. One of those
persons to whom a whole joint is a mere
trifle was tempted to accept a wager to the
effect that he could not take three shillings
worth of bread and ale at a meal. The
man who laid the wager provided twelve
new hot penny loaves, and steeped them in
several quarts of ale. The effect of the ale
upon the hot crumb of the bread was such
as to send off the glutton into a drowsy
helplessness long before he had come to the
end of his allotted task, and he was greatly
mortified afterwards at having lost the
wager.

If the propensity be really due to an
abnormal condition of the system, a morbid
craving which physiologists and physicians
can trace to an organic source, the person
is no more to blame than other patients
suffering under maladies. But if he boasts
of his achievements, and makes them the
subject of bets, we can have no difficulty in
settling the degree of reprobation due to
him. About forty years ago there was an
inscription on the window of a small roadside
inn, between Peckham and Sydenham,
recording such a boast; whether railways
and other novelties have swept it away, we
cannot tell, but Hone described it thus:
March 16, 1810,
Thomas Mount Jones dined here,
Eat six pounds of bacon, drank nineteen pots of beer.
It is nonsense, and a libel upon the
four-footed races, to call such exhibitions of
gluttony brutal or beastly; seeing that real
brutes and beasts eat only when they are
hungry, and leave off when they have had
enough.

THE LAST OF THE CHIEFS.

THIS morning I received a letter from
the distant shores of Vancouver Island.
"All your Indian friends are dying off,"
it told me. "Last week old Tsosieten
died." He was the last of the powerful
coast chiefs, and this little piece of news
has led me to call up many of my
recollections of him, and of Tsohailum, his
great rival. They were two of the most
remarkable men ever seen on the North
Pacific coast—pure savages; but, yet,
their history has a touch of romantic
interest about it. The fish-eating tribes who
infest the North-West Coast and the salmon
rivers flowing into the Pacific, are not a
race fruitful in men of much intellect or
force of character. Still, now and then
some marked men rise up among them.
Such a one was Leschi, who roused up the
whole Indian tribes of Washington
territory and Oregon to war against the whites
in 1855. For two years they waged a
warfare which nearly exterminated the
Americans from the former country, though, to
the honour of the English be it spoken,
only one Hudson's Bay servant or officer
was killed, and he by accident. Everywhere
this extraordinary man passed among
the Indian tribes, "like night from land to
land," exciting them by telling them that
the whites were driving them to a country
where all was darkness, where the rivers
flowed mud, and where the bite of a
mosquito wounded like the stroke of a spear.
Such was the force of his character that,
in one day, the Indian tribes, over an
immense extent of country, rose almost as