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

of Boston. About six years ago he wrote me for information on the subject of health. He had read my works, and those of Mr. Graham, and seemed not only convinced of the general importance of studying the science of human life, but of the superiority of a well selected vegetable diet, especially at the East. He was also greatly anxious that missionaries should be early taught what he had himself learned. The following is one of his first paragraphs: "I feel fully convinced that you are engaged in a work second to few if any of the great enterprises of the day. If there be any class of men standing in special need of correct physiological knowledge, that class consists of missionaries of the cross. What havoc has disease made with this class, and for the most part, as I feel convinced, because, before and after leaving their native land, they live so utterly at variance with the laws of their nature." He then proceeds to say, that the American missionaries copy the example of the English, and that they all eat too much high-seasoned food, and too much flesh and fish; and argues against the practice by adducing facts. The following is one of them: "My Siamese teacher, a man about forty years old, says that those who live simply on rice, with a little salt, enjoy better health, and can endure a greater amount of labor, than those who live in any other way. * * * The great body of the Siamese use no flesh, except fish. Of this they generally eat _a very little_, with their rice." The next year I had another letter from him. He had been sick, but was better, and thought he had learned a great deal, during his sickness, about the best means of preserving health. He had now fully adopted what he chose to call the Graham system, and was rejoicing--he and his wife and children--in its benefits. He says, "If a voice from an obscure corner of the earth can do any thing toward encouraging your heart and