The advantage of a reform in diet is obviously greater than that of any other.  It strikes at the root of the evil.  To remedy the abuses of legislation, before we annihilate the propensities by which they are produced, is to suppose that by taking away the effect the cause will cease to operate.  But the efficacy of this system depends entirely on the proselytism of individuals, and grounds its merits, as a benefit to the community, upon the total change of the dietetic habits in its members.  It proceeds securely from a number of particular cases to one that is universal, and has this advantage over the contrary mode, that one error does not invalidate all that has gone before.

Let not too much, however, be expected from this system.  The healthiest among us is not exempt from hereditary disease.  The most symmetrical, athletic, and longlived is a being inexpressibly inferior to what he would have been, had not the unnatural habits of his ancestors accumulated for him a certain portion of malady and deformity.  In the most perfect specimen of civilized man, something is still found wanting by the physiological critic.  Can a return to nature, then, instantaneously eradicate predispositions that have been slowly taking root in the silence of innumerable ages?—­Indubitably not.  All that I contend for is, that from the moment of the relinquishing all unnatural habits no new disease is generated; and that the predisposition to hereditary maladies gradually perishes, for want of its accustomed supply.  In cases of consumption, cancer, gout, asthma, and scrofula, such is the invariable tendency of a diet of vegetables and pure water.

Those who may be induced by these remarks to give the vegetable system a fair trial, should, in the first place, date the commencement of their practice from the moment of their conviction.  All depends upon breaking through a pernicious habit resolutely and at once.  Dr. Trotter asserts that no drunkard was ever reformed by gradually relinquishing his dram.  (See Trotter on the Nervous Temperament.) Animal flesh, in its effects on the human stomach, is analogous to a dram.  It is similar in the kind, though differing in the degree, of its operation.  The proselyte to a pure diet must be warned to expect a temporary diminution of muscular strength.  The subtraction of a powerful stimulus will suffice to account for this event.  But it is only temporary, and is succeeded by an equable capability for exertion, far surpassing his former various and fluctuating strength.  Above all, he will acquire an easiness of breathing, by which such exertion is performed, with a remarkable exemption from that painful and difficult panting now felt by almost every one after hastily climbing an ordinary mountain.  He will be equally capable of bodily exertion, or mental application, after as before his simple meal.  He will feel none of the narcotic effects of ordinary diet.  Irritability, the direct consequence of exhausting