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ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE FOOD.


"For my part I do much admire, with what soul or with what
appetite the first man, with his mouth touched slaughter, and
reached to his lips the flesh of a dead animate."--PLUTARCH.

We ought not perhaps to insist too much on the opinions of the heathen
philosophers, because the extension of knowledge, and a more matured
experience, has shown the fallacy of many of their notions; but if we
were permitted to lay any stress on the authority of these celebrated
men, we might bring forward a mine of classical learning in commendation
of a vegetable diet; we might point to the life of a Pythagoras, or a
Seneca, as well as to the works of a Plato, and show how the wisest
among the ancients lived, as well as thought, with regard to this
subject.

But we shall be contented, as far as authority is concerned, to rest our
claims to attention, rather upon that which bears a more modern date,
and to bring forward the evidence of facts instead of the theories of
ingenuity. The subject itself we may venture to hope, though a little
homely, is not without interest, and certainly not unimportant. It is
somewhat scientific from its very nature, and so far from being a matter
confined to the medical faculty, it is one on which every man exerts,
every day of his existence, his own free choice, as far indeed as custom
has allowed him the exercise of that freedom.