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

the contrary, it probably hastened his dissolution. His bowels became irregular, his pulse increased, and he fell into a bilious fever, of which he died at the great age of ninety-three. Probably there are, on record, few cases of longevity more instructive than this. Besides showing the evil tendency of living at the expense of life, it also shows, in a most striking manner, the effects of simple and unstimulating food and drink, even in old age; and the danger of recurring to the use of that which is more stimulating in very advanced life. In this last respect, it confirms the experience of Cornaro, who was made sick by attempting, in his old age, and at the solicitation of kind friends, to return to the use of a more stimulating diet; and of Parr, who was destroyed in the same way, after having attained to more than a hundred and fifty years. But the fact that living at the expense of life, cuts down, here and there, in the prime of life, or even at the age of fifty, a few individuals, though this of itself is no trivial evil, is not all. Half of what we call the infirmities of old age--and thus charge them upon Him who made the human frame _subject_ to age--have their origin in the same source; I mean in this living too fast, and exhausting prematurely the vital powers. When will the sons of men learn wisdom in this matter? Never, I fear, till they are taught, as commonly as they now are reading and writing, the principles of physiology. HOWARD, THE PHILANTHROPIST. Although individual cases of abstinence from animal food prove but little, yet they prove something in the case of a man so remarkable as John Howard. If he, with a constitution not very strong, and in the midst of the greatest fatigues of body and mind, could best sustain himself on a bread and water, or bread and tea diet, who is there that would not be well sustained on vegetable food? And yet it is certain that Howard was