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

the diseases of cattle often afflict those who subsist on them. "In 1599," he observes, "the Venetian government, to stop a fatal disease among the people, prohibited the sale of meat, butter, or cheese, on Pain of death." SIR ISAAC NEWTON. This distinguished philosopher and mathematician is said to have abstained rigorously, at times, from all but purely vegetable food, and from all drinks but water; and it is also stated that some of his important labors were performed at these seasons of strict temperance. While writing his treatise on Optics, it is said he confined himself entirely to bread, with a little sack and water; and I have no doubt that his remarkable equanimity of temper, and that government of his animal appetites, throughout, for which he was so distinguished to the last hour of his life, were owing, in no small degree, to his habits of rigid temperance. THE ABBE GALLANI. The Abbé Gallani ascribes all social crimes to animal destruction--thus, treachery to angling and ensnaring, and murder to hunting and shooting. And he asserts that the man who would kill a sheep, an ox, or any unsuspecting animal, would, but for the law, kill his neighbor. HOMER. Even Homer, three thousand years ago, says Dr. Cheyne, could observe that the Homolgians--those Pythagoreans, those milk and vegetable eaters--were the longest lived and the honestest of men. DR. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. Dr. Franklin, in his younger days, often, for some time together, lived exclusively on a vegetable diet, and that, too, in small quantity. During his after life he also observed seasons of abstinence from animal food, or _lents_, as he called them, of considerable length. His food and drink were, moreover, especially in early life, exceedingly simple; his meal often consisting of nothing but a biscuit and a slice of bread, with a bunch of raisins, and perhaps a basin of gruel. Now, Dr. F. testifies of himself; that he found his progress in science to be in proportion to that clearness of mind and aptitude of conception which can only be produced by total abstinence from animal food.