THE NATURAL DIET. 15 



erally denied them, and meat is therefore substituted. He 

 forgets, also, that he lived under very different hygienic 

 conditions from theirs — he in the open country and in 

 pure air, while they are in cities, which are rightly called the 

 "graveyards of the human race ;" moreover, that from his 

 mother or his father there came to him a sturdy inheri- 

 tance, while to the youngsters he looks down upon were 

 more than likely bequeathed infirmities which had been 

 in their families for several generations. 



Men have theorized over their own diet for scores of 

 years yet they are no nearer agreement now than they 

 were in the beginning. One calls attention to the fact 

 that Scotch Highlanders, the Irish, the peasantry of Italy, 

 Spain, and Portugal, Chinamen, and other races thrive on 

 oatmeal, potatoes, corn, chestnuts, olives, rice or lentils, 

 with little or no meat, and that in Scotland a mountaineer 

 will walk thirty or forty miles a day on oatmeal cakes or 

 porridge with a little barley broth and a modicum of milk 

 or butter, while an Indian palanquin-bearer will carry his 

 burden twenty-five or thirty miles a day with only two 

 meals of unleavened cakes and a little ghee. 



Another points to the Eskimos, to the fishing popula- 

 tion of Norway, and to the Pecherais of the southern end 

 of South America, who subsist most of the time wholly 

 on animal food ; also to the fact that for months the 

 hunters of the West have little or no food but the flesh 

 of the animals they kill. 



What do these facts prove } Merely that man can live 

 on vegetable or on animal foods. There is nothing con- 

 clusive in all this. Neither the flesh-eaters nor the vege- 

 table-eaters as a whole are superior races ; and it is a sig- 

 nificant fact that when the East Indian rebellion against 

 the English occurred not many years ago some of the 

 hardest fighters among the Hindus were the sepoys who 

 had been accustomed by the English to a mixed diet. 



