tive
duties in the most appropriate, correct, and healthful manner. My
appetite is constantly good, and as constantly improving;--that is,
going on toward perfection. I can detect, especially by taste, almost
any thing which is in the least offensive or deleterious in food or
drink; and yet I can receive, without immediate apparent disturbance,
and readily digest, almost any thing which ever entered a human
stomach--knives, pencils, clay, chalk, etc., perhaps excepted. I can eat
a full meal of cabbage, or any other very objectionable crude aliment,
or even cheese or pastry--a single meal, I mean--with apparent impunity;
not when fatigued, of course, or in any way debilitated, but in the
morning and when in full strength. It is true, I make no experiments of
this sort, except occasionally _as_ experiments.

In my former statements I gave it as my opinion that vegetable food was
less aperient than animal. My opinion now is, that if we were trained on
vegetable food, and had never received substances into the stomach which
were unduly stimulating, we should find the intestinal or peristaltic
action quite sufficient. The apparent sluggishness of the bowels, when
we first exchange an animal diet for a vegetable one, is probably owing
to our former abuses. At present, I find my plain vegetable food, in
moderate and reasonable quantity, quite as aperient as it ought to be,
and, if I exceed a proper quantity, too much so.

I have now no remaining doubts of the vast importance that would result
to mankind, from an universal training from childhood, to the exclusive
use of vegetable food. I believe such a course of training, along with a
due attention to air, exercise, cleanliness, etc., would be the means of
improving our race, physically, intellectually, and morally, beyond any
thing of which the world has yet conceived. But my reasons for this
belief will be seen more fully in another place. They are founded in
science and the observation of facts around me, much more than on a
narrow individual experience.

There is one circumstance which I must not omit, because it is full of
admonition and instruction. I have elsewhere stated that, twenty-three
years ago, I had incipient phthisis. Of this fact, and of the fact that
there were considerable inroads made by disease on the upper lobe of
the right lung, I have not the slightest doubt. The symptoms were such
at the time, and subsequently, as could not have been mistaken. Beside