vegetable diet produced the slightest injury; in most it has been
attended with changes undeniably beneficial.

"Should ever a physician be born with the genius of Locke, he might
trace all bodily and mental derangements to our unnatural habits, as
clearly as that philosopher has traced all knowledge to sensation. What
prolific sources of disease are not those mineral and vegetable poisons,
that have been introduced for its extirpation! How many thousands have
become murderers and robbers, bigots and domestic tyrants, dissolute and
abandoned adventurers, from the use of fermented liquors, who, had they
slaked their thirst only with pure water, would have lived but to
diffuse the happiness of their own unperverted feelings! How many
groundless opinions and absurd institutions have not received a general
sanction from the sottishness and intemperance of individuals!

"Who will assert that, had the populace of Paris satisfied their hunger
at the ever-furnished table of vegetable nature, they would have lent
their brutal suffrage to the proscription-list of Robespierre? Could a
set of men, whose passions were not perverted by unnatural stimuli,
look with coolness on an _auto da fe_? Is it to be believed that a being
of gentle feelings, rising from his meal of roots, would take delight in
sports of blood?

"Was Nero a man of temperate life? Could you read calm health in his
cheek, flushed with ungovernable propensities of hatred for the human
race? Did Muley Ismail's pulse beat evenly? was his skin transparent?
did his eyes beam with healthfulness, and its invariable concomitants,
cheerfulness and benignity?

"Though history has decided none of these questions, a child could not
hesitate to answer in the negative. Surely the bile-suffused cheek of
Bonaparte, his wrinkled brow, and yellow eye, the ceaseless inquietude
of his nervous system, speak no less plainly the character of his
unresting ambition than his murders and his victories. It is impossible,
had Bonaparte descended from a race of vegetable feeders, that he could
have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the throne of the
Bourbons.

"The desire of tyranny could scarcely be excited in the individual; the
power to tyrannize would certainly not be delegated by a society neither
frenzied by inebriation nor rendered impotent and irrational by disease.
Pregnant, indeed, with inexhaustible calamity is the renunciation of
instinct, as it concerns our phy