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

medicine, or surgery a leading or favorite study. As I have written other works besides this--especially the "Young House-Keeper"--which treat, more or less, of diet, it may possibly be objected, that I sometimes repeat the same idea. But how is it to be avoided? In writing for various classes of the community, and presenting my views in various connections and aspects, it is almost necessary to do so. Writers on theology, or education, or any other important topic, do the same--probably to a far greater extent, in many instances, than I have yet done. I repeat no idea for the _sake_ of repeating it. Not a word is inserted but what seems to me necessary, in order that I may be intelligible. Moreover, like the preacher of truth on many other subjects, it is not so much my object to produce something new in every paragraph, as to explain, illustrate, and enforce what is already known. It may also be thought that I make too many books. But, as I do not claim to be so much an originator of _new_ things as an instrument for diffusing the _old_, it will not be expected that I should be twenty years on a volume, like Bishop Butler. I had, however, been collecting my stock of materials for this and other works--published or unpublished--more than twenty-five years. Besides, it might be safely and truly said that the study and reading and writing, in the preparation of this volume, the "House I Live In," and the "Young House-Keeper," have consumed at least three of the best years of my life, at fourteen or fifteen hours a day. Several of my other works, as the "Young Mother," the "Mother's Medical Guide," and the "Young Wife," have also been the fruit of years of toil and investigation and observation, of which those who think only of the labor of merely _writing them out_, know nothing. Even the "Mother in her Family"--at least some parts of it--though in general a lighter work, has been the result of much care and labor. The circumstance of publishing several