diet; and Abernethy, a name yet more familiar in our ears, has left us
this maxim, that "a vegetable diet and abstinence from fermented liquors
tends more than anything else to tranquillize the system."--(vide the
_Abernethian Code_.) Another popular and scientific writer of the
present day makes a similar confession, which coming from such an
unexpected quarter carries weight: "Although professedly friends to
gastronomy, moderated by a decided aversion to anything like sensuality,
we are of opinion that man is less fit to feed upon carnal than
vegetable substance." (Accum's _Culinary Chemistry_.)

The author of _The Art of Improving Health_, has also a passage in
point: "An animal diet, especially in temperate climates, is more
wasting than a vegetable; because it excites by its stimulating
qualities a fever after every meal, by which the springs of life are
urged into constant and weakening exertions: on the contrary, a
vegetable diet tends to preserve a delicacy of feeling, a liveliness of
imagination, and an acuteness of judgment, seldom enjoyed by those who
live principally on meat." Thus we might go on multiplying authorities
on this subject, but we shall content ourselves with referring briefly
to one or two authors of a more literary stamp, and have done with
quotation. The eloquent Shelley, in his notes to _Queen Mab_, pretty
roundly assures us, that "according to comparative anatomy, man
resembles frugivorous animals in everything, carnivorous in nothing;"
and the famous author of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, has quaintly but
nervously observed, "As a lamp is choked with over much oil, or a fire
with too much wood, so is the natural heat strangled in the body by the
superfluous use of flesh; thus men wilfully pervert the good temperature
of their bodies, stifle their wits, strangle nature, and degenerate into
beasts." The somewhat visionary but fascinating Rousseau, has also in
his _Treatise of Education_, to which we refer our readers, most