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

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

by Alcott, William A. (William Andrus) · Page 141 of 274 · 95,875 words

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was a poor fisherman, as long as he could follow this pursuit; and ultimately he became a beggar, living on the coarsest and most sparing diet. Old Parr, who died at the age of one hundred and fifty-three, was a farmer, of extremely abstemious habits, his diet being solely milk, cheese, coarse bread, small beer, and whey. At the age of one hundred and twenty he married a second wife by whom he had a child. But being taken to court, as a great curiosity, in his one hundred and fifty-second year, he very soon died--as the physicians decidedly testified, after dissection, in consequence of a change from a parsimonious to a plentiful diet. Henry Francisco, of this country, who lived to about one hundred and forty, was, except for a certain period, remarkably abstemious, eating but little, and particularly abstaining almost entirely from animal food; his favorite articles being tea, bread and butter, and baked apples. Mr. Ephraim Pratt, of Shutesbury, Mass., who died at the age of one hundred and seventeen years, lived very much upon milk, and that in small quantity; and his son, Michael Pratt, attained to the age of one hundred and three, by similar means." Speaking, in another place, of a milk diet, Professor H. observes, that "a diet chiefly of milk produces a most happy serenity, vigor, and cheerfulness of mind--very different from the gloomy, crabbed, and irritable temper, and foggy intellect, of the man who devours flesh, fish, and fowl, with ravenous appetite, and adds puddings, pies, and cakes to the load." LORD KAIMS. Henry Home, otherwise called Lord Kaims, the author of the "Elements of Criticism," and of "Six Sketches on the History of Man," has, in the latter work, written eighty years ago, the following statements respecting the inhabitants of the torrid zone: "We have no evidence that either the hunter or shepherd state were ever known there. The inhabitants at present subsist upon vegetable food, and probably did so from the beginning." In speaking of particular nations or tribes of this zone, he tells us that "the inhabitants of

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