It is commonly asserted that the anthropoid apes live on fruits, nuts, and cereals, but this is not quite true, as they eat insects, worms, small birds, and such other animals as they can capture. According to Marcel Labbe, Professor Verneuil was unable to keep a young lemur in a healthy condition whilst in confinement, even though supplied with the finest of fruit, but it soon became strong and healthy when allowed to roam at will in a forest and supplement its frugivorous diet with the insects on the trees. With this observation to guide him he took it back to Paris and added raw meat to its usual diet, with the result that it remained in perfect health thereafter.

It is also quite certain that in captivity apes always succumb to tuberculosis without a supply of animal food. It is a remarkable fact that tuberculosis is rarely seen in carnivora, although, due to milk infection, it is frequent in the omnivorous pig, but it is quite common amongst cattle, chickens, pheasants, and turkeys. Would it be parlous to hazard the suggestion that the anthropoid apes have only remained as such from the lack or disuse of the weapon-using and house-constructing faculties which caused their troglodytic cognates to develop into man?

Whatever may have been the food of the anthropoid apes, it is really difficult to surmise that of primitive man, but if he originated in a tropical country, it is hardly to be expected that at first it would differ much from that of a frugivorous animal. But even if this statement, which is supported by Cuvier, Bell, Flourens, etc, be true, it is evident that for thousands of years now he has subsisted on a mixed diet, and that for many it is by no means an easy matter to alter it. It is unquestionable that many find it most difficult to change to unaccustomed fleshless proteins and foods, and this is emphatically the case when they have not been prepared in some way to render their nutrient properties more accessible to the digestive juices. I do not doubt that the absence of the customary peptogens of flesh food has much to do with this difficulty, but I am bound to say that when I was in residence at Battle Creek Sanitarium I was astonished to find that out of the five hundred patients, most of whom had been previously living on the usual American diet of three meat meals a day, supplemented in many cases by large potations of alcohol and excessive indulgence in tobacco, an incredibly small number appeared to have any objections to, or to be affected in a deleterious manner by, the great change. I attribute this fact in a large degree to the careful preparation of the food, and especially to the almost invariable dextrinisa-tion of the starches, so that the diastatic property of the saliva is utilised and nutrition thus benefited at an earlier stage than is usual.

According to Dr. Kellogg, the essential feature of the diet at Battle Creek was that it was antitoxic, by which he meant that it contained no substance, nor any ingredient, likely to be converted into toxin in the alimentary canal and so produce auto-intoxication. It was decidedly a low-protein diet, and was constructed as nearly as possible of 10 per cent. protein, 30 per cent, fat, and 60 per cent. carbohydrate. It was likewise purin free, no beverage except milk, a variety of curdled milk called yogurt, apple juice, grape juice, water, and a sample of scorched cereal preparation to resemble coffee being allowed.

Many of the benefits alleged to be due to a fleshless diet are clearly incapable of being demonstrated, and may indeed just as well be due to the low protein content or the extreme moderation. Kellogg has lived in a community of flesh-abstainers for forty-five years, and for forty of these years has made careful note regarding the incidence of cancer amongst them. In all that time he has only known of two instances of cancer in flesh-abstainers, one case in a woman of fifty years of age, the other in a man. This latter was melanotic sarcoma of the eyelid, which was removed and recurred just in front of the ear about four years ago. Since this was removed by excision, the patient has remained well. He reports one authenticated case of a flesh-eater who had epithelioma at the back of the neck. He states that "a cure occurred about four years after the man had changed his habits of life by becoming a flesh-abstainer, sleeping out of doors and taking a considerable amount of daily exercise. Such a case is, however, not unprecedented, as spontaneous cure of undoubted cancer has occurred in cases without any such remarkable alteration of the daily life. Rogers Williams states that negroes in Africa on practically any diet were quite exempt from this malady, and that even after transplantation to America, where they were subjected to excessively hard work and a very frugal diet, the disease was by no means common. When, however, slavery was abolished and they adopted more luxurious habits, they became equally prone to cancer with the people of the United States. The cancer mortality of the negroes in South Carolina, where they live on a simple diet, is 12 per 100,000, while whites are dying at the rate of more than 150 per 100,000. In Chicago, however, the mortality of the negroes is greater than that of the whites.

Precisely the same experience was noted in connection with tubercle. In their wild condition, subsisting on an undoubtedly mixed diet, the Red Indians of North America knew nothing of tubercle, whereas now, in the midst of civilisation, one out of every four succumbs to the white plague.

On the other hand, evidence is daily accumulating that on a simpler diet of fruits, nuts, and cereals, drunkenness is practically impossible, and that adoption of this diet is almost always followed by a cure. There is also a disposition to give credence to the statement that appendicitis is practically unknown amongst vegetarians. Lucas-Champonniere in an analysis of 20,000 patients among Roumanian peasants, who live chiefly on vegetables, found only one case of appendicitis, whereas the proportion amongst city-dwellers in Roumania - the diet being of a mixed character - was one case among every 221 patients. Owen Williams asserts that this is to be attributed to the excess of saturated fatty acids in a meat diet as compared with the unsaturated fatty acids in a vegetable diet, the former being less easily absorbed and liable to be deposited in the submucosa, thus cutting off the blood supply to the mucou3 membrane and so rendering invasion by organisms an easy matter.

It is often thought that on a fleshless diet sexual desire is not nearly so great, but I think that this is a question of the amount, rather than the kind of protein. I hardly think that the dog is the most prurient of animals. I should say that distinction must be reserved for the rabbit, and it is notorious that sexual precocity is fairly common among herbivora. I know of two vegetarians whose sexual desire almost amounts to satyriasis, and the frugivorous habits of the Japanese do not seem to have relieved them of the koshiwara.

It is reported that the new system instituted amongst the Yale undergraduates of permitting them to select their own items from a carefully prepared menu has resulted in a practical low-protein system obtaining amongst them, and it is stated that this has diminished immorality amongst the students. Dr. Chalmers Watson points out that excess of animal foods produces changes in the mammary glands of all pregnant animals, and asserts that this induces inability to nurse the offspring, and is one cause of the physical deterioration which is creating such anxiety in this country. Dr. Rymer has shown that in a large experience amongst vegetarians, the tendency is for the teeth to simulate those of the herbivora and lose their cusps, and Dr. Kaufmann, of Birmingham, has observed that children who profess an aversion for meat are very apt in after life to become tubercular.