The Chemistry of Cookery

the butcher’s men through the streets like a dog. I have seen this sheep steal mutton-chops and devour them raw. It preferred beef or mutton to grass. It enjoyed robust health, and was by no means ferocious. It was merely a disgusting animal, with excessively perverted appetite; a perversion that supplies very suggestive material for human meditation. My own experiments on myself, and the multitude of other experiments that I am daily witnessing among men of all occupations who have cast aside flesh food after many years of mixed diet, prove incontestably that flesh food is quite unnecessary; and also that men and women who emulate the aforesaid sheep to the mild extent of consuming daily about two ounces of animal tissue combined with six ounces of water, and dilute this with such weak vegetable food as the potato, are not measurably altered thereby so far as physical health is concerned.[21] On economical grounds, however, the difference is enormous. If all Englishmen were vegetarians and fish-eaters, the whole aspect of the country would be changed. It would be a land of gardens and orchards, instead of gradually reverting to prairie grazing-ground as at present. The unemployed miserables of our great towns, the inhabitants of our union workhouses, and all our rogues and vagabonds, would find ample and suitable employment in agriculture. Every acre of land would require three or four times as much labour as at present, and feed five or six times as many people. No sentimental exaggeration is demanded for the recommendation of such a reform as this. FOOTNOTE: [21] Since the above was written I have met with some alarming revelations concerning the increasing prevalence of cancer, which, if confirmed, will force me to withdraw this conclusion. This horrible disease has increased in England with increase of prosperity—with increase of luxury in feeding—which in this country means more flesh food. In the ten years from 1850 to 1860, the deaths from cancer had increased by 2,000; from 1860 to 1870 the increase was 2,400; from 1870 to 1880 it reached 3,200, above the preceding ten years. The