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

Till they are three years old, he says, their diet should consist of plain milk, panada, good bread, barley meal porridge, and rice. He also complains of pampering them with animal food. The same arguments which are good for forming them to the habits of vegetable food exclusively for the first three years of life, would be equally good for its continuance. DR. CULLEN, OF EDINBURGH. The name of Dr. Cullen is well known, and he has long been regarded as high authority. Yet this distinguished writer and teacher expressly says, that a very temperate and _sparing_ use of animal food is the surest means of preserving health and obtaining long life. But I will quote his own language, in various parts of his writings. And first, from his Materia Medica: "Vegetable aliment, as never over-distending the vessels or loading the system, never interrupts the stronger emotions of the mind, while the heat, fullness, and weight of animal food, is an enemy to its vigorous efforts. Temperance, then, does not consist so much in the quantity, for that will always be regulated by our appetite, as in the _quality_, viz., a large proportion of vegetable aliment." I will not stop here to oppose Dr. C.'s views in regard to the quantity of our food; for this is not the place. It is sufficient to show that he admits the importance of _quality_, and gives the preference to a diet of vegetables. He seems in favor, in another place in his works, of sleeping after eating--perhaps a heresy, too--and inclines to the opinion that the practice would be hardly hurtful if we ate less animal food. But his "First Lines of the Practice of Physic," abounds in testimonies in favor of vegetable food. In speaking, for example, of the cure of rheumatic affections, he has the following language: "The cure, therefore, requires, in the first place, an antiphlogistic regimen, and particularly, a total abstinence from animal food, and from all fermented or spirituous liquors." "Antiphlogistic regimen," in medical language, means that food and drink which is most cooling and quieting to