Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages: Including a System of Vegetable Cookery

all the other plagues and epidemical distempers, of which we have any faithful accounts, will be found to have originated in a deprivation of vegetable food. "The only objections I have ever heard urged (the only plausible ones, he must mean, I think), is the notion of its inadequacy to the sustenance of the body. But this is merely a strong prejudice into which the generality of mankind have fallen, owing to their ignorance of the laws of life and health. Agility and constant vigor of body are the effect of health, which is much better preserved by a herbaceous, aqueous, and sparing tender diet, than by one which is fleshy, vinous, unctuous, and hard of digestion. "So fully were the Romans, at one time, persuaded of the superior goodness of vegetable diet, that, besides the private example of many of their great men, they established laws respecting food, among which were the _lex fannia_, and the _lex licinia_, which allowed but very little animal food; and, for a period of five hundred years, diseases were banished along with the physician from the Roman empire. Nor has our own age been destitute of examples of men, brave from the vigor both of their bodies and their minds, who at the same time have been drinkers of water and eaters of vegetables.[12] "Nothing is more certain than that animal food is inimical to health. This is evident from its stimulating qualities producing, as it were, a temporary fever after every meal; and not only so, but from its corruptible qualities it gives rise to many fatal diseases; and those who indulge in its use seldom arrive at an advanced age. "We have the authority of the Scripture for asserting that the proper aliment of man is vegetables. See Genesis. And as disease is not mentioned as a part of the cause, we have reason to believe that the antediluvians were strangers to this evil. Such a phenomenon as disease could hardly exist among a people who lived entirely on a vegetable food; consequently all the individuals made mention of in that