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

motion, speed, and power of endurance which so distinguish vegetable-eaters, wherever a fair comparison is instituted. They possess a suppleness like that of youth, even long after what is called the juvenile period of life is passed over. They are often seen running and jumping, unless restrained by the arbitrary customs of society, in very advanced age. Their wounds heal with astonishing rapidity in as many days as weeks, or even months, in the latter case. All this could not happen, were there not a good state of the fluids of the system conjoined, to a happy state of the solids. The vegetable-eater, if temperate in the use of his vegetables, and if all his other habits are good, will endure, better than the flesh-eater, the extremes of heat and cold. This power of endurance has ever been allowed to be a sure sign of a good state of health. The most vigorous man, as it is well known, will endure best both extremes of temperature. But it is a proof also of the greater purity of his solids and fluids. The secretions and excretions of his body are in a better state; and this, again, proves that his blood and other fluids are healthy. He does not so readily perspire excessively as other men, neither is there any want of free and easy perspiration. Profuse sweating on every trifling exertion of the body or mind, is as much a disease as an habitually dry skin. But the vegetable-eater escapes both of these extremes. The saliva, the tears, the milk, the gastric juice, the bile, and the other secretions and excretions--particularly the dejections--are as they should be. Nay, the very exhalations of the lungs are purer, as is obvious from the breath. That of a vegetable-eater is perfectly sweet, while that of a flesh-eater is often as offensive as the smell of a charnel-house. This distinction is discernible even among the brute animals. Those which feed on grass, grain, etc., have a breath incomparably sweeter than those which prey on animals. Compare the camel, and horse, and cow, and sheep,