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

more digestible, and more nutritious, or perhaps all this at once, must be legitimate, and even preferable--if not for the individual, at least for the race. But the difficulty alluded to is, how to select a few choice dishes from the wide range--short of flesh and fish--which God and nature permit. For if we believed in the use of eggs when commingled with food, we should hardly deem it proper to go the whole length of our French brethren, who have nearly seven hundred vegetable dishes, of which eggs form a component part; nor the whole length even to which our own powers of invention might carry us; no, nor even the whole length to which the writer of an English work now before us, and entitled "Vegetable Cookery," has gone--the extent of about a thousand plain receipts. We believe the whole nature of man, and even his appetite, when unperverted, is best served and most fully satisfied with a range of dishes which shall hardly exceed hundreds. It is held by Dr. Dunglison, Dr. Paris, and many of the old school writers, that all made dishes--all mixtures of food--are "more or less rebellious;" that is, more or less indigestible, and consequently more or less hurtful. If they mean by this, that in spite of the accommodating power of the stomach to the individual, they are hurtful to the race, I go with them most fully. But I do _not_ believe that _all made dishes, to all persons_, are so directly injurious as many suppose. God has made man, in a certain sense, omnivorous. His physical stomach can receive and assimilate, like his mental stomach, a great variety of substances; and both can go on, without apparent disease, for a great many years, and perhaps for a tolerably long life in this way. There is, however, a higher question for man to ask as a rational being and as a Christian, than whether this or that dish will hurt him directly. It is, whether a dish or article is _best_ for him--best for body, mind, and heart--best for the whole