Animal food is more heating and stimulating than nourishing. Lions, tigers, hyenas, cats, crows and buzzards are excessively fond of it. The Thayers, Pooles, Maces, Hyers, Bayers, Heenans and Sullivans, who follow fisticuffing and practice the "manly art" of pounding the heads of their fellow men, eat not only meats, but raw meats, to give them courage and animal strength. But Pythagoras, Plato, Plutarch, Diogenes, St. Chryostom, the noblest of the Roman philosophers, the wisest of the new Platonists, and other royal-souled men of the past, were vegetarians. And in more modern times such distinguished men as John Wesley, Benjamin Franklin, Emanuel Swedenborg, John Howard, Sir Richard Philips, Shelley, Wordsworth, de Lamartine and others abstained for a time, or wholly, from animal food, and, as several of them have intimated, greatly to their advantage.

Closely connected with meat and beef eating is the unwise, not to say villainous, practice of feeding the sick upon beef-tea. Physicians ought to know better than to recommend it. Prof. G. F. Masterman proves in its "chemical analysis that it is very analogous to urine, except that it contains less uric acid and urea." Dr. Holbrook, editor of "The Herald of Health," contends that "No matter how carefully made it contains only from one and a half to two and a quarter per cent, of solid matter, which is made up mainly of urea, kreatine, kreatin ine, isaline and decomposed haematin - all of which is to be found in urine."

While beef-tea is somewhat stimulating, it is not as nutritious as milk, wheat-meal or barley gruel, rightly prepared. In Bright's disease beef-tea is especially injurious. Dr. Neale declares that in diarrhea, dysentery and typhoid fever it is really a poison. In Central as in South America urine is a common vehicle for medicine, and I have seen Chinese and Malay doctors administer it as such. There is high medical authority for saying that beef tea and urine when drank produce similar effects upon the human system.

Americans eat too fast and too much. The very best food if taken in too great quantities, and bolted down in a flood of tea or coffee, will, instead of being digested, decompose, ferment and rot into acidity, causing a burning or scalding sensation in the throat and stomach.

Dr. Beaumont, looking into the gunshot wound in the side of the Canadian soldier, Alexis St. Martin, and studying the process of digestion, saw that when food was cut into small pieces upon the plate, chewed finely, and thoroughly intermixed with the saliva it soon dissolved and was easily digested.

Condiments, greasy gravies and undigested food sour and literally rot in the stomach, producing heaviness, soreness, headache, bad breath - in a word, dyspepsia. In that form of dyspepsia where there is anaemia and a laxness of the fibers of the body, I have found the following, with certain rules of diet, a very satisfactory formula. Take of

Pure Sulphate of Quinine, 48 grains.

Concentrated Infusion of Calumba, 6 ozs.

Simple Syrup, 5 ozs.

Dilute Phosphoric Acid, 1 oz. Mix.

-

Of this mixture take two teaspoonfuls in water three times a day, increasing it to three teaspoonfuls after the first week.

If there is an aversion to quinine, use this mixture instead. Take of

Concentrated Infusion of Calumba, 11 ozs.

Aromatic Spirit of Ammonia, 1 oz.

Bicarbonate of Soda, 1 drachm. Mix.

Dose, the same as the quinine mixture.

-

When there is nervous depression, irritability and restlessness from any cause, take frequent warm baths and use the following preparation. It may be considered a specific. Take of

Bromide of Potassium, 5 drachms 1 scruple.

Spirit of Ammonia, 5 1/2 drachms.

Tincture of Calumba, 8 ozs.

Pure Water, 1 oz. Mix.

Take one teaspoonful twice a day in a wineglassful of water, increasing the dose gradually.

Ohio women weigh on an average nine pounds more than those of Boston. The diet of the East and the West is very different.

I eat little or no animal food, because in the healthiest cattle and sheep there is more or less waste matter, or effete, dead substance in the muscles and blood, not removed by the circulation, and I insist that this effete matter and broken-down tissue in the flesh and blood and livers of slain beasts are not fit to eat. Fruit and vegetable eaters get their nourishment in all its purity from the original source, and convert it themselves, for the first time, into flesh and blood, while flesh-eaters re-chew and re-digest that which has once been chewed, swallowed, digested and made into animal flesh. Eating dead animals in health and drinking warm bullock's blood in cases of consumption are not commendable practices. And yet venison, wild fowl and fish are preferable to imperfect, withered vegetables, sour baker's bread and soggy potatoes fried in lard - a common dish at hotels.

"But," says some one, "I eat just what I like - just what tastes good." Exactly; and so do the pigs! Sensible people, gifted with reason a,nd a fair degree of common sense, eat that which is nourishing and healthy. Tastes and appetites must be trained and drilled and brought into subjection to the judgment and the true science of life.

In 1871 I accompanied Frederick W. Evans, a prominent American Shaker, to London. The Elder is a rigid vegetarian, having tasted of neither fish, fowl or animal food of any kind for full 50 years. While in London we were invited to breakfast with a member of Parliament; there were present Hep-worth Dixon and other literary gentlemen, and several members of Parliament. Being asked into the breakfast-room, Elder Frederick deliberately stepped to his satchel and taking therefrom a large slice of coarse Graham bread laid it by his plate. The breakfast was inviting and costly; but Elder Frederick stoutly refused coffee, tea, buttered toast, beefsteak, fish, chops, butter - everything but a cup of milk and the bread that he had brought all the way from America! That was courage; that was living up to principle.

One of the guests inquired of the Elder why he brought with him his bread. "Because," said he, "I wanted bread fit to eat. This fermented bread upon your table, made of superfine flour, is not fit to eat." Then followed a sharp, scathing rebuke upon gluttony and gormandizing, upon hygiene and diet, ending with these words: "As an Englishman I am ashamed of you; you ought to repent, every one of you; behave yourselves better and become Christians! "

General Grant is reported to have said recently: "The greatest bore of my life is, that everybody wants me to eat, and they don't think they show any hospitality unless an hour and a half is spent at the table."

Fickle fashion slays multitudes each year. Never use hair dyes. The basis of blondine, powders and paints is sugar of lead - a poison - often causing nervousness, paralysis, sore eyes, softening of the brain and neuralgia. Long trains, high-heeled shoes and bangs are abominations. Why cover the forehead with hair and expose the arms? The low caste Hindoos and the Indian squaws of the West have banged their hair for centuries. And why wear long trailing trains? Stepping upon one in the street and hearing it rip is to me music. "Ladies" should not use morphine to produce sleep, belladonna to make the eyes bright, nor arsenic to make the skin clear.

There are American women, governed more by love of approbation than principle, who will say, "Stay to tea; do stay!" and then they will sit around the table and gossip - gossip long hours away when they had better be asleep or at work, or learning how to cook potatoes. Few women do this bit of kitchen work even decently. Potatoes should be boiled with their skins on in pure water, which, when they are done, should be drained off and the pot left uncovered. It should then stand over the fire until the potatoes are dry, when, if preferred, they may be baked, and I may say a nice baked potato is to be preferred to a boiled one.

The choicest, richest portions of the potato, the apple, the pear and all kinds of fruit lie close to the skin; therefore, pare thinly and eat slowly and sparingly. Yes, sparingly of such kinds of foods as make muscle, sinew, bone, nerve, nerve-cells and brain force.

Shall we laugh and talk while we eat? No; let the ducks and geese do that. It becomes them. The rhyme runs thus:

"Let the wild duck quack as he eats,

And the grasshopper sing."

The Hindoo sages of a remote antiquity considered eating a kind of sacrament, to be engaged in abstemiously and silently. The ancient Pythagoreans ate in profound silence; Shakers never speak at the table, unless in receiving or passing a plate or dish. Clear-headed and thoughtful people, knowing the needs and wastes of the system, eat to replace these wastes - eat grains and fruits; eat milk, rice, eggs, barley, beans and berries that blush in fields and ripen in gardens; eat such foods as contain nitrogen for the muscles, iron for the blood, lime for the bones, silica for the nails and phosphorus for the brain.

The English are fond of bacon and are largely given to beef eating; they like their roasts very rare, and, accordingly, are inclined to be aggressive and dictatorial, boasting of deadly battles and great victories won by sea and by land.

The Buddhists of Ceylon and Siam subsist mostly upon rice and coconuts, and are naturally peaceful. Our American Shakers are nearly all vegetarians, and they are the longest-lived people upon the face of the earth. Statistics and the white modest tombstones in their cemeteries prove this.

Giessen's tame bear was very gentle and kind when fed upon bread and fruits; but being fed a few weeks upon raw meat he would become rough and bloodthirsty. Both animals and men grow to be like what they are fed on. The wild, graceful deer of the north lands, without meats, fats or oils, cannot only withstand the cold, but can out-run the leopards and lions of the hot, tropical South.

The human system is an extensive organic chemical laboratory, in which are manufactured molecules, epithelium, mucus, muscles, nerves, saliva, gastric juice, chyme, chyle, blood, lymph, tears, hair, nails, cuticle, cartilage, bone and brain-cells. And this wonderful human system, under the guiding influence of the intelligent mind, builds up a better structure, a cleaner, more ethereal and more enduring body from the elements constituting the grains, vegetables and fruits than from mutton, beef and bacon. While I do not say that every person, considering life-long habits, temperament and organization, should abstain at once from all meat eating, I do say that less and less animal food is consumed each year, and that in the approaching year 2,000 the man who indulges in eating the flesh of dead animals will be looked upon as a kind of cannibal.