464 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



provement incidental to an active agricultural life have offered an at- 

 tractive theme. The vegetable kingdom can satisfy all. "If any 

 vegetarians be extravagant in milk and eggs, it is not from any craving 

 of their stomachs, but from excess in zeal or ignorance in their cooks. ' ' 

 (Newman, Frazer's Magazine, February, 1875.) Finally the Bible 

 itself has been drawn upon to furnish lasting proof: "Behold, I have 

 given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the 

 earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; 

 to you it shall be for meat." (Genesis, i., 29.) 



The advocates of the vegetarian diet at the present day are no less 

 ready to draw upon the diverse types of argument already discussed 

 than were their predecessors of fifty years ago. In a recent volume, 

 entitled 'The Living Temple' (1903), Dr. J. H. Kellogg, urging the 

 use of non-meat diet, has presented the ethics of flesh-eating in the 

 following light: 



Tlie basis for the ethical argument against flesh-eating is to be found in 

 the fact that the lower animals are^ in common with man, sentient creatures. 

 We have somehow become accustomed to think of our inferior brethren, the 

 members of the lower orders of the animal kingdom, as things; . . . We are 

 wrong in this; they are not things, but beings. ... A horse or a cow can 

 learn, remember, love, hate, mourn, rejoice, and suffer, as human beings do. 

 Its sphere of life is certainly not so great as man's, but life is not the less 

 real and not the less precious to it; and the fact that the quadruped has little 

 is not a good and sufficient reason why the biped, who has much, should 

 deprive his brother of the little that he hath. For the most part it must be 

 said that the lower animals have adhered far more closely to the divine order 

 established for them than has man. 



The divine order, as clearly shown by nature as well as by revelation, and 

 by the traditions of the ancient world, and illustrated by the present practice 

 of a great part of the human race makes the vegetable world the means of 

 gathering and storing energy and making it into forms usable by the sentient 

 beings that compose the animal world, the one gathering and storing that the 

 other may expend. When animal eats vegetable, there is no pain, no sorrow, 

 no sadness, no robbery, no deprivation of happiness. No eyes forever shut to the 

 sunlight they were made to see, no ears closed to the sweet melodies they were 

 made to hear, no simple delights denied to the beings that God made to enjoy 

 life — the same life that He gave to his human children. (Pp. 184-185.) 



On the other hand, we may recall Eobert Louis Stevenson's ap- 

 parent defense of cannibalism among some of the peoples inhabiting 

 the South Sea Islands, He writes: 



How shall we account for the universality of the practice over so vast an 

 area, among people of such varying civilization, and, with whatever inter- 

 mixture, of such different blood? What circumstance is common to them all, 

 but that they lived on islands destitute, or very nearly so, of animal food? I 

 can never find it in my appetite that man was meant to live on vegetables only. 

 When our stores ran low among the islands, I grew too weary for the recurrent 

 day when economy allowed us to open another tin of miserable mutton. And 

 in at least one ocean language, a particular word denotes that a man is 



