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

etc.; and it will either prevent such diseases as cancer, gout, epilepsy, scrofula, and consumption, or prolong life under them. Who that has ever thought of the condition of our domestic animals, especially about towns and cities--their want of good air, abundant exercise, good water, and natural food, to say nothing of the butter-cup and the other poisonous products of over-stimulating or fresh manures which they sometimes eat--has not been astonished to find so little disease among us as there actually is? Animal food, in its best state, is a great deal more stimulating and heating to the system than vegetable food;--but how much more injurious is it made, in the circumstances in which most animals are placed? Do we believe that even a New Zealand cannibal would willingly eat flesh, if he knew it was from an animal that when killed was laboring under a load of liver complaint, gout, consumption, or fever? And yet, such is the condition of most of the animals we slay for food. They would often die of their diseases if we did not put the knife to their throats to prevent it. One more consideration. If the exclusive use of vegetable food will prevent a multitude of the worst and most incurable diseases to which human nature, in other circumstances, seems liable; if it will modify the diseases which a mixed diet, or absolute intemperance, or gluttony had induced,--by what rule can we limit its influence? How know we that what is so efficacious in regard to the larger diseases, will not be equally so in the case of all smaller ones? And why, then, may not its universal adoption, after a few generations, banish disease entirely from the world? Every person of common observation, knows that, as a general rule, they who approach the nearest to a pure vegetable and water diet, are most exempt from disease, and the longest-lived and most happy. How, then, can it otherwise happen than that a still closer approximation will afford a greater exemption still, and so on indefinitely? At what point of an approach toward