"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,

The proper study of mankind is man."

- Pope.

Golden Age

IN the traditions of all nations there constantly occurs the idea of a lost paradise where man once lived free from disease in perfect happiness and freedom. The historians of all ancient nations from Herodotus downwards represent the people as looking backward to a "golden" age, when animals were not slain for food and all was perfect happiness and peace. Several centuries before the time of Christ, we know that Buddha, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plutarch, and many other of the ancient reformers taught the doctrines of the non-use of flesh as an article of food. Hesiod, eight centuries before Christ, pictures the "golden" age in which flesh foods were unknown. The non-use of flesh food as an article of diet is not a new question by any means, in fact it is as old as the hills themselves. When one considers that considerably more than one-half of the world's inhabitants of to-day are not flesh eaters, that is, are vegetarians, using the word in its broadest sense, the condition which led to it must have been the outcome and creation of centuries.

By the term vegetarian is meant one who does not use flesh as a food, replacing meat by nuts, fruits, cereals, and vegetables.

The Japanese, the Chinese, the Buddhists of India, with millions of others of the East, have been vegetarians for a period of between three to four thousand years, at least, probably were always so. Why the people of the East should be vegetarians, even those living in the colder countries, while we of the West should be just as pronounced meat-eaters is an interesting question.

Fruit Age

Man's strong resemblance to the anthropoid apes which subsist almost exclusively on fruits and nuts places him in the frugivorons class. In fact all the great anatomists, Sir Charles Bell, Dr. Richard Owen, Dr. William P. Carpenter, Baron Cuvier, and many others, have shown that not only is man adapted by anatomical structure to a diet of fruit and nuts, but that the meat-eaters' violation of this law has been the undoubted source of endless suffering and disease. This fact which had been already recognized by the ancient sages Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, Plutarch, and others, has already been fully confirmed by the great universal law of evolution which Lamarck, Darwin, and Haeckel have scientically established, and which has thrown much light upon the origin of life and its development on our planet.