"Chemistry," says Blackwood's Magazine, "has already told us many remarkable things in regard to the vegetable food we eat—that it contains, for example, a certain per centage of the actual fat and lean we consume in our beef, or mutton, or pork—and, therefore, that he who lives on vegetable food may be as strong as the man who lives on animal food, because both in reality feed on the same things, in a somewhat different form."
There is this difference, however, that in the one case—that is, in the use of the vegetables which contain the elements referred to—we save the trouble of running it through the body of the living animal, and losing seven eighths of it, as we do, practically in the process; whereas in the other we do not. We also save ourselves the necessity of training the young and the old to scenes of butchery and blood.
PROF. JOHNSTON.
This gentleman, in a recent edition of his "Elements of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology," tells us that from experiments made in the laboratory of the Agricultural Association of Scotland, wheat and oats, when analyzed, contain of nutritious properties the following proportion:
| Musc. matter. | Fat. | Starch. | |
| Wheat, | 10 pounds, | 3 pounds, | 50 pounds. |
| Oats, | 18 " | 6 " | 65 " |
Thus oats, and even wheat, are quite rich in that which forms muscular matter in the human body.
SIMEON COLLINS, OF WESTFIELD, MASS.
This gentleman, in his fifty-first year, states that having been for several years afflicted with a severe cough, which he supposed bordered upon consumption, he "discontinued the use of flesh meat, fish, fowl, butter, gravy, tea, and coffee, and made use of a plain vegetable diet." "My bread," says he, "is made of unbolted wheat meal; my drink is pure cold water; my bed, for winter and summer, is made of the everlasting flower; and my health is, and ever has been, perfect, since I got fairly cleansed from the filthiness of flesh meat, and other pernicious articles of diet in common use.
"My business requires a great degree of activity, and I can truly say that I am a stranger to weariness or languor. At the time of entering upon this system, I had a wife and five children, the youngest eight years of age;—they all soon entered upon the same course of living with myself, and soon were all benefited in health. I have now six children—the youngest fifteen months old, and as happy as a lark. Previous to the time of our adopting the present system of living, my expenses for medicine and physicians would range from $20 to $30 a year—for the last four years it has been nothing worth naming."