Fruit flesh

“ There is the conserved force of food. This is found primarily in the grass, the wheat, the rice, the fruit, which grow in our fields and orchards. The lower animals feed on these, and through the process of digestion and assimilation, they are transmuted into blood and bone and muscle—thus furnishing man, who stands at [304] the top and the end of the creative process, with a more refined higher form of food. But whether in the shape of grass, rice, wheat, or in the more refined form of animal flesh, these various elements of food are only so much transmuted sunshine. ”

“ When they are to be eaten, the skin, or rather flesh, must be taken off, under which are found six or seven white kernels, placed in a circular order, and the pulp with which these are enveloped, is the fruit, than which nothing can be more delicious: It is a happy mixture of the tart and the sweet, which is no less wholesome than pleasant; and with the sweet orange, this fruit is allowed in any quantity to those who are afflicted with fevers, either of the putrid or inflammatory kind. ”

“ Plant running, not of stocky habit, but healthy and vigorous; fruit obtusely conical, three inches broad at the stem, and two inches and a half in depth; skin yellowish-white, thin and tender while the fruit is young, hard and shell-like when ripe; flesh dry and well flavored in its green state, and often of good quality at full maturity. ”

“ Their common food is roots, herbs, leaves, and young branches; they also eat fruit and corn, but they have a dislike to flesh and fish. When one of them finds a good pasture, he calls the others, and invites them to come and feed with him. ”

“ But, in completing the circle, the vegetable receives from the animal the air which was thrown out in respiration, and lives and grows upon it, and at length the animal itself, in whole or in part, and the refuse which it daily throws off, become the food of the vegetable. Even the very bones of an animal are by the aid of Nature or man made to increase the growth of vegetables, and really to enter into their structure; and, being again eaten, animals may be said to eat their own bones and live on their own flesh. ”

“ The Highest to which the vegetable kingdom could attain was the blossom; and of this the sexual parts are the completion. At the instant when the sex originated, the vegetable functions became of a nobler character; for the sexual organs are only the inferior organs refined or purified by light. The electrical and chemical process of the vegetable body are again represented, but in a spiritual manner, in the blossom. The functions of the fruit were none other than those of the elevated chemism; they were only the nobler processes of digestion and nutrition. ”

“ A fruit, on the other hand, lays itself open in every way to attract the attention of animals, and so to be dispersed by their aid, often amid the nourishing refuse of their meals. It is true that, with the fruit as with the nut, to digest the actual seed itself would be fatal to the life of the young plant. But fruits get over this difficulty by coating their seeds first with a hard, indigestible shell, and then with a soft, sweet, pulpy, and nutritious outer layer. ”

“ The various secretions of vegetables, as of odour, fruit, gum, resin, wax, honey, seem brought about in the same manner as in the glands of animals; the tasteless moisture of the earth is converted by the hop-plant into a bitter juice; as by the caterpillar in the nut-shell the sweet kernel is converted into a bitter powder. While the power of absorption in the roots and barks of vegetables is excited into action by the fluids applied to their mouths like the lacteals and lymphatics of animals.
2. The individuals of the vegetable world may be considered as inferior or less perfect animals ”

“ For medicinal purposes, bark, leaves, flowers, fruits, roots, bulbs, the expressed juice, and milky or resinous secretions of plants, etc.* [11] are obtained from the vegetable world. The skin, nails, wool, blood, flesh, fat, marrow, bones, are procured from the animal world. ”

“ Naturally everything, not devoured by beast or insect, rots upon the spot and the seeds of the fruit find their way into the ground. For this reason many new trees spring up in groups, obtaining their first alimentation from the dissolution of the corpse. ”

“ Each fruit contains the germ of a new plant, and a quantity of nutritious matter surrounding and developing that germ. The general belief is, that this nutritious matter, and even the peculiar combination in which it is found in the fruit, has been made directly for the immediate use of man. ”

“ A similar line of argument holds good with fruits; that a ripe strawberry or cherry is as pleasing to the eye as to the palate; that the gaily coloured fruit of the spindle-wood tree, and the scarlet berries of the holly, are beautiful objects,—will be admitted by every one. ”

“ We have in like sort such workmen as are not only excellent in grafting the natural fruits, but also in their artificial mixtures, whereby one tree bringeth forth sundry fruits, and one and the same fruit of divers colours and tastes, dallying as it were with nature and her course, as if her whole trade were perfectly known unto them: of hard fruits they will make tender, of sour sweet, of sweet yet more delicate, bereaving also some of their kernels, other of their cores, and finally enduing them with the savour of musk, amber, or sweet spices, at their pleasures. ”

“ Disregarding what we call fruits and looking at it from the plant’s point of view, a fruit is anything in which, or upon which, a seed is developed or ripened quite without regard as to whether it is edible by man or not. ”

“ But fruit also literal: for what joy of vegetation is lacking to the man who every month in the year can look through his study-window on a green lawn, and have strawberries and cream for his breakfast,—who can sit down to this royal fruit, and at the same time to apricots, peaches, nectarines, blackberries, raspberries, melons, figs both yellow and purple, early apples, and grapes of three kinds? ”

“ The fruit is replete, not only with acid, mucilage and sugar, but with its own peculiar aromatic and highly volatile secretion, elaborated within itself, on which its fine flavour depends. How far are we still from understanding the whole anatomy of the vegetable body, which can create and keep separate such distinct and discordant substances!
Nothing is more astonishing than the secretion of flinty earth by plants, which though never suspected till within a few years, appears to me well ascertained. ”

“ It has been assumed by some writers on Natural History, that every wild fruit is the food of some bird or animal, and that the varied forms and structure of their mouths may be necessitated by the peculiar character of the fruits they are to feed on ”

“ Let the fruit be ever so luscious and ever so laden with sweet sirups, it can never secure the suffrages of the higher animals if it lies hidden beneath a mass of green foliage, or clothes itself in the quiet garb of the retiring nut. To attract from a distance the eyes of wandering birds or mammals, it must dress itself up in a gorgeous livery of crimson, scarlet, and orange. The contrast between nuts and fruits is exactly parallel to the contrast between the wind fertilized and the insect-fertilized flowers. ”

“ The shade is beautiful for walks, and the fruit not unpleasant, especially the second kind, of which with new wine and honey, they make a conditum of admirable effect to corroborate the stomach; and the fruit alone is good in dysentery’s and lasks. ”

“ In botany we have no such word as fruit. What you call fruit is in some trees the seed. In all species of nuts, for instance, the fruit and the seed are one and the same thing—that is to say, the kernel of the nut is both fruit and seed. ”

“ Another source of the food of animals includes seeds or eggs; in these the embryon is in a torpid or insensible state, and there is along with it laid up for its early nourishment a store of provision, as the fruit belonging to some seeds, and the oil and starch belonging to others; when these are consumed by animals the unfeeling seed or egg receives no pain, but the animal receives pleasure which consumes it. ”

“ Others, placed near refreshing waters, and near trees loaded with fruit, are ever devoured with unquenchable thirst and hunger. If they stoop to drink the water flies from their mouth, and a stinking mire sticks to their lips. If they lower a limb to cull a fruit, the limb slips from their hand. ”

“ And seeing the Liver receiveth nothing but what is evil and depraved, What can that procreate of good, and diffuse throughout the whole body? Therefore as I have said, one Member must suffer by another, till the errour become common. Whilst a Tree or an Herb in the ground remains temperate, that it be neither too wet nor too dry, its root draweth from the earth virtue, and imparteth it to the trunk, and the trunk to the branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit, and is able to produce fruit conducible to health, for many years. ”

“ How oft it chances that the apparent fruit of a shrub, its apple, is merely a gall or blight! How many men, meeting with some blast in the moist, growing days of their youth, so that what should have been a sweet and palatable fruit in them becomes a mere puff and excrescence, say that they have experienced religion! Their fruit is a gall, a puff, an excrescence, for want of moderation and continence. So many plants never ripen their fruit. ”

“ Hence our appetites and the bountiful provision made for us extend our choice to both the vegetable and animal kingdoms, and it is possible to find vegetable foods on which man could live as long as upon animal food alone. Bread is in vegetable foods that which flesh is in animal foods, and each within itself contains nearly all the elements required for nutrition. ”

“ Male and female influence necessary in animals, insects, and vegetables, both in production of seeds and buds; does the embryon seed produce the surrounding fruit, like insects in gall-nuts?
NOTE XXXIX ... VEGETABLE GLANDULATION. Vegetable glands cannot be injected with coloured fluids; essential oil; wax; honey; nectary, its complicate apparatus; exposes the honey to the air like the lacrymal gland; honey is nutritious; the male and female parts of flowers copulate and die like moths and butterflies, and are fed like them with honey; anthers supposed to become insects ”

“ Orchard fruits are conveniently divided into large and small fruits, the large fruits being represented by the apple, pear, peach, quince, etc., and the small fruit by the cherry and plum. Fruits were doubtless among the earliest foods of man, and this leads to another classification of fruits, namely, wild and cultivated. ”

“ Further, there seems to be an indissoluble bond existing between all the sources of food. There are the same classes of elements in flesh as in flour, and the same in animals as in vegetables. The vegetable draws water and minerals from the soil, while it absorbs and incorporates the air in its own growth, and is then eaten to sustain the life of animals, so that animals gain the substances which the vegetable first acquired. ”

“ For this reason then we are forbidden to eat seeds and certain plants, but we are allowed to eat fruit and vegetables, only not those that creep on the ground, but those that are raised up from the earth and hang high in the air. ”

“ Generally, every fruit, on ripening, and just before it falls, when it commences a more independent and individual existence, requiring less nourishment from any source, and that not so much from the earth through its stem as from the sun and air, acquires a bright tint. ”

“ Their food is bread fruit, which grows upon trees somewhat resembling apple trees. It grows like an apple, but as large as a main's bead. This is prepared for eating by roasting it in the fire and by taking off the skin. ”

“ Seeing, moreover, that the source of flesh in animals which are used as food is vegetables, it follows that vegetables should have the same elements as flesh, and it is a fact of great interest that in vegetables we have foods closely analogous to the flesh of animals. Thus, in addition to water and salts, common to both, there is vegetable jelly, vegetable albumen, vegetable fibrine, and vegetable caseine, all having a composition almost identical with animal albumen, gelatine, chondrine, and caseine. ”

“ As for leaves, you can think of a great many fragrant kinds in a few minutes, not only green-house plants, like some of the geraniums, but many of the weeds of the fields.
Some vegetables produce very remarkable fruits.
FRUIT OF THE BREAD FRUIT TREE, REDUCED IN SIZE.
A species of fig-tree bears loaves of bread! ”

“ In our oranges and grape-fruit and in a score of other fruits, the elimination of seeds is exactly one of the modifications we have bred and selected for, in order to make the fruits less troublesome in their eating. ”

“ Without doubt fruit is more truly wholesome ripe than green; and I would here remark, that the craving for vegetable acids which these boys had, and which most children experience, would not be felt if they were properly fed at home. ”

“ Certain classes of plants use a portion of animal food. We are accustomed to the idea of animals eating plants, but when we see the tables turned, and the plants eating animals, that is queer, indeed! The animal food of the “flesh-eating,” or carnivorous, plants is really the juice sucked from the bodies of insects. ”

“ Keep the fruit from being injured by lying on the ground; and if slate, blackened shingles, or any dry, dark material, be placed beneath it, by attraction of the sun's rays, the fruit will ripen earlier and better. ”

“ The tree is abundantly under the dominion of Jupiter, and therefore the fruit must needs breed good blood, and yield commendable nourishment to the body; yet if eaten over-much, they make the blood thick, procure head ache, and bind the body ”

“ 29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. ”