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

is better--all other things being equal--than that which is produced from any other food. For proof of this, we need but the testimony of Oliver and other physiologists. They tell us, unhesitatingly, that under the same circumstances, chyle which is formed from vegetables will be preserved from putrefaction many days longer--the consequence of greater purity and a more perfect vitality--than that which is formed from any admixture of animal food. Is it not, then, better for the purposes of health and longevity? Can it, indeed, be otherwise? I will say nothing at present, for want of space to devote to it, of the indications which are afforded by the other sensible properties of the chyle which is produced from vegetables. The single fact I have presented is enough on that point. The best solids and fluids are produced by vegetable eating. On this single topic a volume might be written, without exhausting it, while I must confine myself to a page or two. In the first place, it forms better bones and more solid muscles, and consequently gives to the frame greater solidity and strength. Compare, in evidence of the truth of this statement, the vegetable-eating millions of middle and southern Europe, with the other millions, who, supposed to be more fortunate, can get a little flesh or fish once a day. Especially, make this comparison in Ireland, where the vegetable food selected is far from being of the first or best order; and whose sight is so obtuse as not to perceive the difference? I do not say, compare the enervated inhabitant of a hot climate, as Spain or Italy, with the inhabitant of England, or Scotland, or Russia, for that would be an unfair comparison, wholly so; but compare Italian with Italian, Frenchman with Frenchman, German with German, Scotchman with Scotchman, and Hibernian with Hibernian. In like manner, compare the millions of Japanese of the interior, who subsist through life chiefly on rice, with the few millions of the coasts who eat a little fish with their rice. Make a similar comparison in China and in Hindostan. Notice,