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

require it." This reasoning, at first view, appears very _specious_. But upon second view, we see it is wanting--greatly so--in solidity. It takes for granted, as I understand it, that what we call civilization, has rendered animal food necessary to man. But is it not obvious that the condition of things which is thus supposed to render this species of food necessary, is not likely to disappear--nay, that it is every century becoming more and more the law, so to speak, of the land? Who is to stop the labor-saving machine, the railroad car, or the lightning flash of intelligence? And do not these considerations, if they prove any thing, prove quite too much? For if, in the onward career of what is thus called civilization, we have gone from a diet which scarcely required the use of animal food in order to render it both palatable and healthful, to one in whose dishes it is generally blended in some one or more of its forms, must we not expect that a still further progress in the same course will render the same kind of diet still more indispensable? If flesh, fish, fowl, butter, cheese, eggs, lard, etc., are much more necessary to us now, than they were a thousand years ago, will they not be still more necessary a thousand years hence? I do not see how we can avoid such a conclusion. And yet such a conclusion will involve us in very serious difficulties. In Japan and China--the former more especially--if the march of civilization should be found to have rendered animal food more necessary, it has at the same time rendered it less accessible to the mass of the population. The great increase of the human species has crowded out the animals, even the domestic ones. Some of the old historians and geographers tell us that there are not so many domestic animals in the whole kingdom of Japan, as in a single township of Sweden. And must not all nations, as society progresses and the millennium dawns, crowd out the animals in the same way? It