150 BULLETIN OF THE UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN. 



is the most costly of all articles of food, as Jordan 1 and 

 many another experimenter have found. 2 It can be readily 

 seen that to raise wheat and corn and then feed them to cattle 

 must make the product more expensive than to use the grains 

 in their original form for human food. The process of passing 

 corn through cows and hogs before it reaches man involves time 

 and labor and waste which the consumer of flesh must pay for. 

 Paley 3 wrote as follows upon this subject some time ago: 



"In England, notwithstanding the produce of the soil has been con- 

 siderably increased by the enclosure of wastes, and the adoption, in 

 many places, of a more successful husbandry, yet we do not observe 

 a corresponding addition to the number of inhabitants, the reason of 

 which appears to me to be the more general consumption of animal 

 food amongst us. * * * If we measure the quantity of provision 

 by the number of human bodies it will support in due health and 

 vigor, this quantity, the extent and quality of the soil from which 

 It is raised being given, will depend greatly upon the kind. For in- 

 stance, a piece of ground capable of supplying animal food sufficient 

 for the subsistence of ten persons, would sustain at least the double 

 of that number with grain, roots, and milk." 



Dr. Kichardson, in "Modern Thought" for July, 1880, devel- 

 ops this thought in an interesting way. He says: 



"We really ought to consider the question of utilizing, on a large 

 scale, all vegetables which, in nutrient value, stand above animal 

 products. We have also to learn, as a first truth, the truth that the 

 oftener we go to the vegetable world for our food, the oftener we go 

 to the first, and, therefore, to the cheapest source of supply. The com- 

 monly accepted notion that when we eat animal flesh we are eating 

 food at its prime source cannot be too speedily dissipated, or too speed- 

 ily replaced by the knowledge that there is no primitive form of 

 food — albuminous, starchy, osseous — in the animal world itself, and 

 that all the processes of catching an inferior animal, or of breeding 

 it, rearing it, keeping it, dressing it, and selling it, mean no more nor 

 less than entirely additional expenditure throughout for bringing into 

 what we have been taught to consider an acceptable form of food 

 the veritable food which the animal itself found, without any such 

 preparation, in the vegetable world." 



1 Loc. cit. 



2 See, for instance, Atwater, op. cit., p. 23 ; also Smith, quoted by Kingsford, 

 The Perfect Way of Diet, p. 103. 



* Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy. 



