44 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
value, but they are the chief cause of the characteristic taste of 
meat. Whether or not they exercise bad effects, or the same 
effects which the like poisons cause when becoming formed in 
our own bodies, science does not say.” “ Together with the 
uric acid are found other poisons, e.g., creatin, creatinin, ete. ; 
so that the flesh diet makes the excretions twice as poisonous 
from animals, as are the excretions of a person who lives on 
fleshless diet.” “It is admitted.” writes Dr. Haig, “ that 
disease germs will grow with the greatest rapidity in beef-tea, 
and other preparations of animal tissue; whereas fruit juices 
will often actually destroy these germs.” 
When an animal is slaughtered for food, its tissues and cells 
before they are all completely dead still go on consuming the 
soluble food-elements which surround them, and they yet produce 
various chemical combinations just as during life ; that is to say, 
they go on working, and giving off waste matters for a time after 
death. But no longer can the body remove these corrupt waste 
products through its several outlets; they accumulate as poisons 
aiter the animals’ death, and tend to spoil the flesh, being no 
more washed away by a circulating stream of pure blood ; and 
we can readily imagine how much worse the effect is when the 
carcase of the animal has been kept for several days before reach- 
ing the kitchen. “Concerning the eating of animals,” says the 
Buddhist Ray, a Hindoo journal, “In the mechanical arts the 
meat-eating nations of the West surpass, as to skill and ingenuity, 
the vegetarian nations of the East. Still, this does not make 
them healthier or happier. The vices, and diseases of the 
Western carnivorous nations have, within the century recently 
ended, been the means of the extinction of whole races. On 
the diet of animal flesh they will never realise the ‘ peace 
and goodwill among men’ spoken of in the Christian Scriptures. 
The dream of a pearly-gated, peaceful, New Jerusalem on a 
carnivorous diet, is the delusory chimera of a fool, ora visionary.” 
Of animal foods, the most rapidly digested are those of soft 
consistence, such as sweetbread, and the like. The white meats, 
chicken, etc., are more digestible than the dark meats, for 
instance, the duck, or pigeon, or even the red meats; but their 
method of cooking greatly influences the result. Fresh fish is 
more rapidly digested than meat. Cauliflower is the most 
speedily digested of all vegetables. 
It is remarkable with respect to the infirmity of stammering 
