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

feared any injury would thereby result to his constitution of body or mind. The case of William Penn, if I remember rightly what he says in his "No Cross no Crown," would have been in point. Jefferson, the third President of the United States, was, according to his own story, almost a vegetable eater, during the whole of his long life. He says he abstained principally from animal food; using it, if he used it at all, only as a condiment for his vegetables. And does any one, who has read his remarks, doubt that his "convictions" were in favor of the exclusive use of vegetable food? However, to prevent the volume from much exceeding the limits originally assigned it, I will be satisfied--and I hope the public will--with the following selections of testimonies, ancient and modern; some of more, some of less importance; but all of them, as it appears to me, worthy of being collected and incorporated into a volume like this, and faithfully and carefully examined. PLAUTUS. Plautus, a distinguished dramatic Roman writer, who flourished about two thousand years ago, gives the following remarkable testimony against the use of animal food, and of course in favor of the salubrity of vegetables; addressed, indeed, to his own countrymen and times, but scarcely less applicable to our own: "You apply the term wild to lions, panthers, and serpents; yet, in your own savage slaughters, you surpass them in ferocity; for the blood shed by them is a matter of necessity, and requisite for their subsistence. "But, that man is not, by nature, destined to devour animal food, is evident from the construction of the human frame, which bears no resemblance to wild beasts or birds of prey. Man is not provided with claws or talons, with sharpness of fang or tusk, so well adapted to tear and lacerate; nor is his stomach so well braced and muscular, nor his animal spirits so warm, as to enable him to digest this solid mass of animal flesh. On the contrary, nature has made his teeth smooth, his mouth narrow, and his