rom the flesh of animals
attain to the greatest longevity.

"Life is prolonged, under incurable diseases, about one tenth by
vegetable diet; so that a person who would otherwise die at seventy,
will reach seventy-seven. In general, however, the proportion is about
one sixth.

"Abstaining from animal food palliates, when it does not cure, all
constitutional diseases.

"The use of animal food hurries on life with an unnatural and unhealthy
rapidity. We arrive at puberty too soon; the passions are developed too
early; in the male, they acquire an impetuosity approaching to madness;
females become mothers too early, and too frequently; and, finally, the
system becomes prematurely exhausted and destroyed, and we become
diseased and old, when we ought to be in middle life.

"It affords no trifling ground of suspicion against the use of animal
food that it so obviously inclines us to corpulency. Corpulency itself
is a species of disease, and a still surer harbinger of other diseases.
It is so even in animals. When a sheep has become fat, the butcher knows
it must be killed or it will rot and decline. It is rare indeed for the
corpulent to be long-lived. They are at the same time sleepy, lethargic,
and short-breathed. Even Hippocrates says, 'Those who are uncommonly fat
die more quickly than the lean.'

"As a general, rule, the florid are less healthy than those who have
little color; an increase of color having ever been judged, by common
sense, to be a sign of impending illness. Some, however, who are lean
upon animal food, thrive upon vegetables, and improve in color.

"All the notions of vegetable diet affording only a deficient
nutriment--notions which are countenanced by the language of Cullen and
other great physicians--are wholly groundless.

"Man is herbivorous in his structure.

"I have observed no ill consequences from the relinquishment of animal
food. The apprehended danger of the change, with which men scare
themselves and their neighbors, is a mere phantom of the imagination.
The danger, in truth, lies wholly on the other side.

"There is no organ of the body which, under the use of vegetable food,
does not receive an increase of sensibility, or of that power which is
thought to be imparted to it by the nervous system.

"Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Epicurus, and others of the masters of ancient
wisdom, adhered to the Pythagorean diet (vegetable diet), and are known
to have arrived at old age with the enjoy