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

there may be, in this conjecture, it is evident to those who understand the animal economy of the frame of human bodies, together with the history, both of those who have lived abstemiously, and of those who have lived freely, that indulging in flesh meat and strong liquors, inflames the passions and shortens life, begets chronical distempers and a decrepit age. "For remedying the distempers of the body, to make a man live as long as his original frame was designed to last, with the least pain and fewest diseases, and without the loss of his senses, I think Pythagoras and Cornaro by far the two greatest men that ever were:--the first, by vegetable food and unfermented liquors; the latter, by the lightest and least of animal food, and naturally fermented liquors. Both lived to a great age. But, what is chiefly to be regarded in their conduct and example, both preserved their senses, cheerfulness, and serenity to the last; and, which is still more to be regarded, both, at least the last, dissolved without pain or struggle; the first having lost his life in a tumult, as it is said by some, after a great age of perfect health. "A plain, natural, and philosophical reason why vegetable food is preferable to all other food is, that abounding with few or no salts, being soft and cool, and consisting of parts that are easily divided and formed into chyle without giving any labor to the digestive powers, it has not that force to open the lacteals, to distend their orifices and excite them to an unnatural activity, to let them pass too great a quantity of hot and rank chyle into the blood, and so overcharge and inflame the lymphatics and capillaries, which is the natural and ordinary effect of animal food; and therefore cannot so readily produce diseases. There is not a sufficient stimulus in the salts and spirits of vegetable food to create an unnatural appetite, or violent cramming; at least, not sufficient to force open and extend the mouths of the lacteals, more than naturally they are