The ethics of diet : a catena of authorities deprecatory of the practice of flesh-eating / by Howard Williams.
- Q15442840
- Date:
- 1883
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The ethics of diet : a catena of authorities deprecatory of the practice of flesh-eating / by Howard Williams. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![The flesh-eating man needs for his support an enormous extent of land, wider ancl more extensive even than the Lion and the Tiger. A nation of Hunters in a circum- scribed territory is incapable of multiplying itself for that reason. The carbon necessary for maintaining life must be taken from animals, of whom in the limited area there can be only a limited number. These animals collect from the plants the elements of their blood and their organs, and supply them to the Indians living by the chase, who devour them unaccompanied by the substance (stoffen) which during the life of the animal maintained the life processes. While the Indian, by feeding upon a single animal, might contrive to sustain his life and health a certain number of days, he must, in order to gain for that time the requisite heat, devour five animals. His food contains a superfluity of nitrogenous substance. What is wanting to it during the greater portion of the year is the necessary quantity of carbon, and hence the inveterate inclination of flesh consumers for brandy. The practical illustration of agricultural superiority cannot be more clearly and profoundly given than in the speech of the North American Chief, which the Frenchman Crevecous has reported to us. The Chief, recommending to his tribe the practice of Agriculture, thus addressed it: 'Do you not observe that, while we live upon Flesh, the white men live [in part] upon Grain ? That Flesh takes more than thirty months to grow to maturity, and besides is often scarce ? That each of these miraculous grains of corn, which they bury in the earth, gives back to them more than a hundredfold ? That Flesh has four legs upon which to run away, and we have only two to overtake them ? That the Corn remains and grows where the white men sow it; that the winter, which for us is a time of toilsome hunting, is for them the time of rest ? Therefore have they so many children, and live so much longer than we. I say, then, to each one who hears me : Before the trees over our wigwams have died from old age, and the maples have ceased to supply us with sugar, the race of the oom-planter will have exterminated the race of the flesh-eater, because the hunters determine hot to sow.' * Liebig's views as to the mischievous effects of the propensity of farmers, and of so-called agriculturists, to convert arable into pasture land are sufficiently well known.f * Quoted in Die Naturgemasse Diat, die Dial der Zukunft, von Theodor Hahn, 1859. We may note here that Moleachott, the eminent Dutch physiologist, and a younger contemporary of Liebig, alike with the distinguished German Chemist and with the French zoologist, Buffon, is chargeable with a strange inconsistency in choosing his place among the apologists of kreophagy, in spite of his conviction that the legumes are superior to flesh-meat in abundance of solid constituents which they contain; and, while the amount of albuminous substances may surpass that in flesh-meat by one-half, the constituents of fat and the salts are also present in a greatei- abundance. (See Die Naturgemasse Diat, von Theodor Hahn, 1859). But, in fact, it is only too obvious why at present the large majority of Scientists, while often fully admitting the virtues, or even the superiority of the purer diet, yet after all enrol themselves on the orthodox side. Either they are altogether indifferent to humane teaching, or they want the courage of their convictions to proclaim the Truth. t Among English philosophic writers, the arguments and warnings (published in the Dietetic Reformer during the past fifteen years) of the present head of the Society for the promotion of Dietary Reform in this country, Professor Newman, in regard to National Economy and to the enormous evils, present and prospective, arising from the prevalent insensibility to this aspect of National Reform are at once the most forcible and the most earnest. It would be well if our public men, and all who are in place and power, would give the most earnest heed to them. But this, unhappily, under the present prevailing political and social conditions, experience teaches to be almost a vain expectation.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21084324_0308.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
