event that, by enabling him to communicate his sensations, raised him above the level of his fellow-animals.  But the steps that have been taken are irrevocable.  The whole of human science is comprised in one question:—­How can the advantages of intellect and civilization be reconciled with the liberty and pure pleasures of natural life?  How can we take the benefits and reject the evils of the system, which is now interwoven with all the fibres of our being?—­I believe that abstinence from animal food and spirituous liquors would in a great measure capacitate us for the solution of this important question.

It is true that mental and bodily derangement is attributable in part to other deviations from rectitude and nature than those which concern diet.  The mistakes cherished by society respecting the connection of the sexes, whence the misery and diseases of unsatisfied celibacy, unenjoying prostitution, and the premature arrival of puberty, necessarily spring; the putrid atmosphere of crowded cities; the exhalations of chemical processes; the muffling of our bodies in superfluous apparel; the absurd treatment of infants:—­all these and innumerable other causes contribute their mite to the mass of human evil.

Comparative anatomy teaches us that man resembles frugivorous animals in everything, and carnivorous in nothing; he has neither claws wherewith to seize his prey, nor distinct and pointed teeth to tear the living fibre.  A Mandarin of the first class, with nails two inches long, would probably find them alone inefficient to hold even a hare.  After every subterfuge of gluttony, the bull must be degraded into the ox, and the ram into the wether, by an unnatural and inhuman operation, that the flaccid fibre may offer a fainter resistance to rebellious nature.  It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.  Let the advocate of animal food force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and, as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth, and plunging his head into its vitals slake his thirst with the steaming blood; when fresh from the deed of horror, let him revert to the irresistible instincts of nature that would rise in judgement against it, and say, ’Nature formed me for such work as this.’  Then, and then only, would he be consistent.

Man resembles no carnivorous animal.  There is no exception, unless man be one, to the rule of herbivorous animals having cellulated colons.

The orang-outang perfectly resembles man both in the order and number of his teeth.  The orang-outang is the most anthropomorphous of the ape tribe, all of which are strictly frugivorous.  There is no other species of animals, which live on different food, in which this analogy exists.  (Cuvier, “Lecons d’Anat.  Comp”. tom. 3, pages 169, 373, 448, 465, 480.  Rees’s “Cyclopaedia”, article Man.) In many frugivorous animals, the canine teeth are more pointed and distinct than those of man.  The resemblance also of the human stomach to that of the orang-outang is greater than to that of any other animal.