Prior chapters have made clear the superiority of the all-plant diet over the flesh diet or over the conventional mixed diet. A few things, however, remain to be said. In nature it is obvious that in "temperate" climes, at least, animals that rely upon the surplus stores of plants for their winter food have infinitely greater chances of survival than do the predacious animals who must rely upon the kill for their sustenance. The plant feeding animals thus have a great advantage over the flesh eaters. This advantage extends to many other features of life which need not be discussed here.

I do not intend to enter into any lengthy discussion of comparative anatomy and physiology at this place, but will content myself with saying that every anatomical, physiological and embryo-logical feature of man definitely places him in the class frugivore. The number and structure of his teeth, the length and structure of his digestive tract, the position of his eyes, the character of his nails, the functions of his skin, the character of his saliva, the relative size of his liver, the number and position of the milk glands, the position and structure of the sexual organs, the character of the human placenta and many other factors all bear witness to the fact that man is constitutionally a frugivore.

As there are no pure frugivores, all frugivores eating freely of green leaves and other parts of plants, man may, also, without violating his constitutional nature, partake of green plants. These parts of plants possess certain advantages, as has been previously pointed out, in which fruits are deficient. Actual tests have shown that the addition of green vegetables to the fruit and nut diet improves the diet.

The vast majority of the human race have at all times been wholly or largely plant feeders. Human tribes that have lived exclusively upon meat and other animal foods have been exceedingly rare or non-existent. Even Eskimo tribes eat some twenty-four different kinds of mosses and lichens, including cloudberry, barberry, crowberry, reindeer moss and other plants, that grow in the arctic.

It is probable that more meat is eaten by man today than at any previous period in his history. Civilization is based on vegetarianism--on agriculture and horticulture. Tribes that depend on hunting and herding do not remain stationary and do not build civilizations.

"When I go back," says Higgins in Anacalypsis II, page 147, "to the most remote periods of antiquity which it is possible to penetrate, I find clear and positive evidence of several important facts: First, no animal food was eaten, no animals were sacrificed." Origenes has left us the record that "the Egyptians would prefer to die, rather than becomes guilty of the crime of eating any kind of flesh.

Herodotus tells us that the Egyptians subsisted on fruits and vegetables, which they ate raw. Plinius confirms this statement. Harold Whitestone, in his The Private Lives of the Romans, says: "Of the Romans it may be said that during the early Republic perhaps almost through the second century B. C., they cared little for the pleasures of the table. They lived frugally and ate sparingly. They were almost strict vegetarians, much of their food was eaten cold, and the utmost simplicity characterized the cooking and the service of their meals."

It was only after the conquest of Greece that the Romans altered their table customs and became a luxury-loving, meat eating people. Even then the poorer classes lived frugally and, as Whitestone says, "every schoolboy knows that the soldiers who won Caesar's battles for him lived on grain which they ground in their handmills and baked at their campfires."

Isis, one of the best beloved of Egyptian goddesses, was thought by them to have taught the Egyptians the art of bread making from the cereals theretofore growing wild and unused, the earlier Egyptians having lived upon fruits, roots and herbs. The worship of Isis was universal throughout Egypt and magnificent temples were dedicated to her. Her priests, consecrated to purity, were required to wear linen garments, unmixed with animal fibre, to abstain from all animal food and from those vegetables regarded as impure--beans, onions, garlic and leeks.

Island tribes have existed who had no access to flesh food and there are several peoples who abstain from meat on religious grounds. We find this so in China, India, Turkey and among the Essenses in Ancient Palestine. The Spartans were forbidden to eat meat and, like the priests of Isis, were forbidden to eat beans. There are sects in India the members of which are still forbidden to eat beans.

Hindhede has shown that on the whole health and length of life are greater among vegetarian than among meat eating peoples. McCarrison has shown that the better nourished fruit-eating Hunzas of North India are the equal in health, strength, freedom from disease and in length of life of any people on earth.

Vegetarian athletes have won honors in more than one field. Indeed where great endurance is required they almost always win. Many thousands of invalids have turned from a mixed diet to a vegetarian or fruitarian diet and have, thereby, saved their lives, even where they were unable to restore themselves to vigorous health.

A surgeon on the staff of the Bone and Joint Hospital, New York City, who has had a wide experience among vegetarians, told me that vegetarian women give birth to their babies very quickly, "drop them like animals" with but little pain, and recuperate very quickly. He added that when he gets a call to attend a childbirth in a vegetarian woman, he wastes no time, but rushes to her bedside and frequently arrives only to find the baby born before he gets there. He also stated that wounds heal more quickly in vegetarians than others. The surgeon, himself is not a vegetarian.

A surgeon here in San Antonio, who has handled deliveries for several mothers that the writer has cared for through their pregnancies, once remarked to me: "When I am called to care for a parturient woman that you have fed I know there are going to be no complications and everything will go as it should, but when I am called to care for a woman who eats in the conventional way, I never know what will happen."

Professor Richet found that fruits and vegetables do not induce serum diseases (anphylaxis), while flesh foods do and interprets his findings to mean that nature vetoes certain proteids, chiefly animal, as unsuitable. Certainly no meat, meat juice or eggs should ever be fed to a child under seven or eight years of age. It has no power to neutralize the poisons from these until this time.

Auto-intoxication and liability to infection are less in vegetarian and fruitarian than in animal feeders; many of the latter scarcely defending themselves at all, but tamely submit to parasitic imposition.

Tacitus tells us that the ancient Orientals refused to eat swine flesh because they were afraid of contracting leprosy if they consumed the animal that served them as a scavenger. Bacon is particularly resistant to the digestive secretions, its fat markedly slowing down gastric digestion.