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

around them. How could he bear to see an impotent and defenceless creature slaughtered, skinned, and cut up for food? How could he endure the sight of the convulsed limbs and muscles? How bear the smell arising from the dissection? Whence happened it that he was not disgusted and struck with horror when he came to handle the bleeding flesh, and clear away the clotted blood and humors from the wounds? "We should therefore rather wonder at the conduct of those who first indulged themselves in this horrible repast, than at such as have humanely abstained from it." PORPHYRY, OF TYRE. Porphyry, of Tyre, lived about the middle of the third century, and wrote a book on abstinence from animal food. This book was addressed to an individual who had once followed the vegetable system, but had afterward relinquished it. The following is an extract from it: "You owned, when you lived among us, that a vegetable diet was preferable to animal food, both for preserving the health and for facilitating the study of philosophy; and now, since you have eat flesh, your own experience must convince you that what you then confessed was true. It was not from those who lived on vegetables that robbers or murderers, sycophants or tyrants, have proceeded; but from _flesh-eaters_. The necessaries of life are few and easily acquired, without violating justice, liberty, health, or peace of mind; whereas luxury obliges those vulgar souls who take delight in it to covet riches, to give up their liberty, to sell justice, to misspend their time, to ruin their health and to renounce the joy of an upright conscience." He takes pains to persuade men of the truth of the two following propositions: 1st. "That a conquest over the appetites and passions will greatly contribute to preserve health and to remove distempers. 2d. "That a simple vegetable food, being easily procured and easily digested, is a mighty help toward obtaining this conquest over ourselves." To prove the first proposition, he appeals to experience, and proves that many of his acquaintance who had disengaged themselves from the