“Many very intelligent men have, at different times of their lives, abstained wholly from flesh; and this, too, with very considerable advantage to their health. Mr. Lawrence, whose eminence as a surgeon is well known, lived for many years on a vegetable diet. Byron, the poet, did the same, as did P. B. Shelley, and many other distinguished literati whom I could name. Dr. Lambe and Mr. F. Newton have published very able works in defence of a diet of herbs, and have condemned the use of flesh as tending to undermine the constitution by a sort of slow poisoning. Sir R. Phillips has published Sixteen Reasons for Abstaining from the Flesh of Animals, and a large society exists in England of persons who eat nothing which has had life.

“The most attentive researches, which I have been able to make into the health of all these persons, induce me to believe that vegetable food is the natural diet of man. I tried it once with very considerable advantage. My strength became greater, my intellect clearer, my power of continued exertion protracted, and my spirits much higher than they were when I lived on a mixed diet. I am inclined to think that the ‘inconvenience’ which some persons profess to experience from vegetable food is only temporary. A few repeated trials would soon render it not only safe but agreeable, and a disgust for the taste of flesh, under any disguise, would be the result of the experiment. The Carmelites, and other religious orders, who subsist only on the productions of the vegetable world, live to a greater age than those who feed on flesh; and, in general, frugivorous persons are milder in their disposition than other people. The same quantity of ground has been proved to be capable of sustaining a larger[318] and stronger population on a vegetable than on a flesh-meat diet; and experience has shown that the juices of the body are more pure, and the viscera much more free from disease, in those who live in this simple way.

“All these facts, taken collectively, point to a period in the history of civilisation when men will cease to slay their fellow-mortals for food, and will tend to realise the fictions of Antiquity, and of the Sybilline oracles respecting a ‘Golden Age.’”[319]

INDEX.

JOHN HEYWOOD, Excelsior Steam Printing and Bookbinding Works, Hulme Hall Road, Manchester.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Quoted by Sir Arthur Helps in his Animals and their Masters. (Strahan, 1873.) The further just remark of Arnold upon this subject may here be quoted:—“Kind, loving, submissive, conscientious, much-enduring we know them to be; but because we deprive them of all stake in the future—because they have no selfish, calculated aims—these are not virtues. Yet, if we say a ‘vicious’ Horse, why not say a ‘virtuous’ Horse?”