every day for therapeutic purposes. It is probable that the
other bodies of the series which are met with in the extract of meat
enjoy analogous physiological properties. These substances are
ingested without discernment, often in great excess, and daily, by
people who consume meat.

Amongst these latter, many would not dare to drug themselves with a
centigramme of pharmaceutic caffeine, whereas they absorb each day gr.
5 and more, of its homologous constituents.

Therefore, in the same way as chocolate, tea and coffee, meat has a
stimulating effect on the system. He who is accidentally deprived of
it finds that he experiences a passing depression. This obviously
proves that by the exaggerated use of meat, one drugs and doctors
oneself without discernment. However this may be, the judicious part
played by meat must apparently be reduced to that of a condiment food
destined to produce in a measure the whipping-up which is useful, and
sometimes indispensable to the system. We cannot here discuss the
expediency of action and the harmlessness of the dose of substances
reputed stimulating. But one can ask oneself whether, to attain this
object of stimulation, carnivorous feeding is indispensable, and if
vegetarianism could not supply the need.

The reply is easy: the vegetable kingdom disposes of a variety of
stimulating articles, such as tea, coffee, kola and cocoa. Through
their active substances these foods are nerve tonics of the first
order, less dangerous in their use than meat, because more easily
assimilated, of far more continuous effects, less mixed with other
substances, sometimes noxious, and consequently more measurable.
Besides, in pulse food, quantities of purins are found as important as
in meat. If the part they play has not been systematically studied
from the point of view of their effects on the nervous organism, they
still give rise to the same terminal products, such as uric acid. One
can quite well argue that the pulse purins have physiological effects
comparable to those of meat purins. On the other hand, vegetable
purins have the considerable advantage of being less easily
precipitated in the urine, after the human interorganic metabolism,
than those resulting from the metabolism of flesh material.

This explains why a frequent use of a vegetable diet offers
appreciable advantages in the amelioration of arthritic diatheses so
common amongst us. Certain effects observed in these diatheses arise
f