ANIMAL FOODS. 45 
in speech, that several leading German physicians now maintain 
the opinion that a diminution in the amount of meat that is 
eaten should be insisted on with a view to lessening these diffi- 
culties of utterance; three weeks of abstinence from meat are 
said to marvellously improve a stammering sufferer. Again, 
in the strange case of Dr. Jekyll, and Mr. Hyde, as told by Robert 
Louis Stevenson, 1896, it is related how the former personage 
discovered by researches in the laboratory that man’s nature is 
not truly that of a unit, but dual,—animal, and intellectual,— 
and that by a certain compound drug, or tincture, containing 
various salts corresponding to meat extractives, the two natures 
could be separated, the animal Hyde being set free to follow his 
unrestrained brutal indulgences. Other drugs could restore the 
former double nature in one, but the oftener the separation was 
practised the greater ascendancy did the low vicious animal 
nature acquire, until at length it got to possess the man alto- 
gether, body and soul. And in this way the moral, and in- 
tellectual redeeming moiety was utterly extinguished, so that 
the monster Edward Hyde completely overpowered the good, 
benevolent Dr. Jekyll, and presently came to a miserable end by 
suicide, that he might escape from the Nemesis of the law for the 
heinous crimes perpetrated through his flesh-eating propensities. 
The people who consume the greatest quantity of meat are the 
Americans, their average individual amount being one hundred 
and seventy-five pounds per annum. The English come next 
with an average of rather more than one hundred and ten pounds. 
The French people eat only half as much meat as the English ; and 
the people of Germany, Italy, and Austria still less. 
Long experience by. English, Scotch, and Irish labourers has 
proved cheese to be a capital substitute for meat in affording 
satisfactory nourishment. A small quantity of sound cheese 
with them takes the place of a large allowance of meat, and 
enables them to endure such hard labour as the American thinks 
he can only perform upon a generous meat diet. In Germany 
farm labourers depend largely upon the curd of milk, ater 
skimming this milk for butter. Such curd is often used in a 
fresh state, and makes an important part of the labourers diet. 
Cheese is less liable to putrefactive change than flesh, and thus 
much less likely to develop in the human system those scrofulous 
diseases which are attributable to animal food, more or less 
diseased, if the truth were known. 
