[216] On the Conduct, &c., and The Primeval Diet of Man, &c., by George Nicholson, Manchester and London, 1797, 1801. The author assumes as his motto for the title-page the words of Rousseau—Hommes, soyez humains! C’est votre premier devoir. Quelle sagesse y a-t-il pour vous hors de l’humanité? “Humans, be humane! It is your first duty. What wisdom is there for you without humanity?”
[217] Surgical Observations on Tumours. John Abernethy, M.D., F.R.C.S.
[218] Excessive poverty of blood, it is obvious to remark, is caused, not by abstaining from flesh but by abstaining from a sufficient amount of nutritious non-flesh foods.
[219] Additional Reports, 1814. Amongst valuable diagnoses of this kind the reader may be referred in particular to the highly interesting one of the Rev. C. H. Collyns, M.A., Oxon, which originally appeared in the Times newspaper, and which twice has been republished by the Vegetarian Society. The success of the pure regimen in first mitigating and, finally, in altogether subduing long-inherited gouty affections, was complete and certain. The recently published evidence of the President of the newly-formed French Society, Dr. A. H. de Villeneuve, is equally satisfactory. (See Bulletin de la Société Végétarienne of Paris, as quoted in Nature, Jan., 1881.)
[220] See, too, the testimony of Newton, Return to Nature, and of Shelley in his Essay on the Vegetable Diet, in which he describes these children as “the most beautiful and healthy beings it is possible to conceive. The girls are the most perfect models for a sculptor. Their dispositions, also, are the most gentle and conciliating.”
[221] The Life of William Lambe, M.D., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. By E. Hare, C.S.I., Inspector-General of Hospitals, to which valuable biography we are indebted for the present sketch. In Mr. Hare’s memoir will be found, among other testimonies to the truths of Vegetarianism, a highly-interesting letter, written to him by his friend Dr. H. G. Lyford, an eminent physician of Winchester.
[222] Life of Shelley, by Jefferson Hogg, quoted by Mr. Hare in Life of Dr. Lambe. Hogg adds that he conformed for good fellowship, and found the purer food an agreeable change.
[223] See the Dietetic Reformer and Vegetarian Messenger, August, 1873.
[224] Pythagoran, Anytique reum, doctumque Platona: “Pythagoras and the Man accused by Anytus [Socrates] and the learned Plato.”—Satires of Horace.
[225] This is, perhaps, scarcely just to Pythagoras and his school. It is, without doubt, deeply to be lamented that they did not more widely promulgate a doctrine of such vital importance to the world; but the reasons of their reserve and partial reticence have been indicated already in our notice of the founder of Akreophagy. In a word—like the Founder of Christianity in a later age—they had many things to say which the world could not then learn. Moreover, as Gleïzès remarks, the teachers themselves could not have, from the nature of the case, the full knowledge of later times.