716 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
in order that the farmer may get a profit on his milk and 
eggs, he has to kill off the bulls, which give no milk, and a 
large number of cocks which yield no eggs. If he reared all 
these, and allowed them to die a natural death, not only 
would his farmyard be a perfect pandemonium, but his expenses 
would be such that in order to sell his milk and his eggs at a 
profit, he would have to demand a prohibitive price for them ; 
so that those persons who consume these articles, though they 
do not eat flesh, are yet accessory to the slaughter of animals. 
In fact, this cock-and-bull story is completely convincing. 
As a general conclusion, it must be said that for healthy persons 
meat and fish (also eggs, milk, and cheese) should be the proteid 
furnishers, together with vegetable foods; though for persons 
disposed to be gouty, perhaps milk and cheese are to be more 
highly commended than meat. It is to be noted that vegetable 
foods are Jess highly flavoured than some animal provisions, 
and meats, but they have the compensating advantage of not 
being liable to undergo putrefactive impairment, and of rarely 
inducing disease. The abundant cellulose which gives bulk to 
the intestinal contents during digestion, and size to the feces, 
signifies vegetarianism more or less; and, (as is said somewhat 
coarsely in Tristram Shandy,) “there are persons who will draw 
a man’s character from no other helps in the world but merely 
from his evacuations; but this often gives a very incorrect 
outline, unless indeed, you take a sketch of his repletions too. 
I should have no objection to this method, but that I think it 
must smell too strong of the lamp.’ Robert Louis Stevenson, 
im one of his fables, The Distinguished Stranger (1896), makes a 
covert thrust at vegetarians which is scarcely fair. It tells of 
a stranger coming to this earth from a neighbouring planet, 
and propounding questions to a philosopher about the objects 
now seen by him for the first time; the trees he admired for 
their heavenward stature, and their singing leaves; but men 
and women he disparaged, and as to the cows he thought them 
dirty, whilst never looking upwards like the noble trees of the 
forest. Then the philosopher explained that the cows were 
engaged in eating grass, and had to spend so much time in 
attending to this food of theirs that they were too busy therewith 
for thinking, or talking, or looking about, or keeping themselves 
clean. The intended moral is manifest. Edward Fitzgerald, 
writing (September, 1833) to his friend Donne (afterwards 
