AS meat should be regarded as a pass-ing expediency in the order of indi-vidual evolution rather than as a fixed and permanent necessity, its indulgence in most cases is far beyond the physiological needs and necessities of the individual. It is safe to say that any true physiological need can find complete satisfaction in the indulgence of three flesh meals per week. Nor, after all, should we forget that it is not the indulgence in meat itself that is back of the great dietetic bugbear called uric acid, but the excess, which makes it impossible for the human furnace to combust its food fuel into physiological ash, in place of pathological clinkers. It is not the meat that destroys us, but the excess of meat, coupled with its inseparable and life-menacing train of soup, gravies, spices, grease and deserts.

To remove meat from a person's diet, the conditions back of it should first be removed. For inasmuch as there is a mental and moral basis for every physical tendency, so it is as futile to try to remove the beefsteak from a person's dietary, as long as the friction and irregularity in the movements of his intellec-ual engine are in need of this biologic shock absorber, as it would be to remove houses of correction and insane asylums from the commonwealth, as long as there are people who have not yet found the straight and narrow road. It is in the very effort of an individual to stop meat-eating while three-fourths of his nervous system is yet vibrating to the strains of ancestral biology, and the digestive secretions still under control of carnivorous cell habits, that we find a cause of the nervous dyspepsia and pathological sensitiveness which is so frequent a condition with our strong-principled but ill-advised vegetarian devotees. On the other hand, as already observed, we are frequently confronted by people whose indulgence in flesh eating is altogether in excess of their biologic needs. The one case is as serious a mistake as the other; for while the former burn up their vital furnace in lack of adequate fuel, the latter, through an excess of fuel, fill their fire-box with clinkers and their draught-pipes with soot.

In our transition stage of historical evolution, when humanity has reached its culmination of high tensioned, nervously overstrung state of social, political and commercial life, the question of meat or no meat in our diet is as much a proposition of psychology as of physiology; of conditions of the mind as of the body. And in view of the constantly increasing number of premature deaths, which unmistakably have their main cause in dietetic errors, it is supremely important that a food scientist should study his subject from a psychological not less than from a physiological point of view. Self-knowledge, self-respect and self-government should be the end as well as the means of individual evolution, and any attitude of life - physical or mental - which interferes with this principle should be eliminated from our life, whether it be the violation of physiological or psychological laws, in excesses of flesh foods or non-flesh foods. A vegetarian diet, if not based on self-control and ethical refinement, is far more immoral and detrimental to health than a flesh diet, gauged by a recognition of physical laws and moral principle. In place of meat poisoning the man, it is in most cases the man, who by his vicious mind, poisons the meat. When the individual is true to his principles and lives in accordance with his best knowledge, self-governed and self-respecting, his position is as safe, as calm, enlightened judgment can make it. Nor must we fail to realize, that as the body is a mere instrument, it is as detrimental and wasteful to the larger life of social duties and human service, to spend time and effort on the body for its own sake, as for an artist to devote his entire time and talent to the tuning and rehearsing of his instrument, at the neglect and sacrifice of his public performance. Eating for its own sake, and for the pleasure and indulgence of it, is as selfish and vicious as to obtain industrial or professional advantages and incomes, while evading the legally official taxation of the personal revenue. In either case it is a theft from life and humanity and must be atoned for sooner or later in individual sacrifice and suffering.