CHAPTER III.
CONSUMPTION—(Continued).
The country boor says he must have meat to make muscle; and all the while his vegetarian team is twitching him and his plow along the furrow. Where does he suppose they get their muscles?—Thoreau.
Stupidly ignorant, or unmindful, of the fact that there are, in this country and Europe, hundreds of thousands of people of all ages, sexes and social positions, who live year in and year out mainly, and a large proportion strictly, on the vegetarian diet, and live in health, not only, but found perfect health by abandoning the common mixed diet and coming nearer to first principles—notwithstanding all this, still the farce goes on among the scientists of “proving” by chemical analyses, pretty theories and specious arguments, that man “can not subsist in health on a vegetarian diet.”[17]
[17] Jules Virey estimates that four-tenths of the human race subsist exclusively on a vegetable diet, and that seven-tenths are practically (though not on principle) vegetarians. Virchow estimates the total number at eighty-five per cent.—Oswald.
“The matter is this: in a cold climate we can not thrive without a modicum of fat, but that fat need not come from slaughtered animals. In a colder country than England, the East-Russian peasant, remarkable for his robust health and longevity, subsists
on cabbage-soup, rye-bread, and vegetable oils. In a colder country than England, the Gothenburg shepherds live chiefly on milk, barley bread, and esculent roots. The strongest men of the three manliest races of the present world are non-carnivorous: the Turanian mountaineers of Daghestan and Lesghia, the Mandingo tribes of Senegambia, and the Schleswig-Holstein Bauern, who furnish the heaviest cuirassiers for the Prussian army and the ablest seamen for the Hamburg navy. Nor is it true that flesh is an indispensable, or even the best, brain-food. Pythagoras, Plato, Seneca, Paracelsus, Spinoza, Peter Bayle, and Shelley were vegetarians; so were Franklin and Lord Byron in their best years. Newton, while engaged in writing his ‘Principia’ and ‘Quadrature of Curves,’ abstained entirely from animal food, which he had found by experience to be unpropitious to severe mental application. The ablest modern physiologists incline to the same opinion. ‘I use animal food because I have not the opportunity to choose my diet,’ says Professor Welch, of Yale; ‘but, whenever I have abstained from it, I have found my health mentally, morally, and physically better.’”—(“Physical Education.”)
With regard to the muscular vigor of vegetarians: if they have not become noted as “winners of rowing, walking, or boxing matches,” it is chiefly because they are rarely sporting men; besides, they are as yet in this country—although their numbers are quite rapidly increasing—in a very small minority; but, of late, since this objection has been so frequently raised, vegetarians have entered the lists, notably in England,
in bicycle races, and have distanced their meat-eating rivals in long races, showing greater staying powers.