Thus we see that in eating meat, we are eating animal waste-material similar to that thrown off through our own body-cells. The waste material in meat being soluble, passes through the walls of our digestive organs, and enters the circulation, where it is added to similar poisons which are constantly being produced within our own bodies. It is the universal law of animal cell-growth that the waste matter of the cell acts as its own poison. When bacteria, growing in a solution of sugar, have excreted alcohol until it forms a certain percentage of the total contents, their activity ceases--they die from poisons thrown off from their own bodies. This is the reason that liquids containing a high percentage of alcohol must be distilled, and cannot be brewed. It is obvious, therefore, that in the consumption of flesh, we are adding to our bodies the poisons that are residual in the body of other animals, and are, therefore, approaching the conditions under which bacteria kill themselves by autointoxication or self-poisoning. Plants utilize the carbon dioxid excreted by the animal, and the excrement of animals is in turn used to fertilize our fields. Although one form of life may utilize what is excreted by another form of life, the living thing that cannot get away from the excreted matter of its own activity is poisoned thereby. [Sidenote: Flesh food burdens the excretory organs] The flesh of animals whose physiological processes are almost identical with our own, containing as it does waste-products that have not yet been excreted, must, when taken into the human body, add extra burdens to our excretory organs which are usually burdened with all they can do. Carnivorous animals are especially provided with an excretory system capable of taking care of such matter, but it is unreasonable to expect the excretory organs of man, which are not adapted to such a purpose, to throw off, in addition to the regular body-poisons, similar decomposing products of other animals. [Sidenote: Flesh-eating will disappear as science advances] It is true that flesh will support, and has supported what is commonly regarded as a high form of anthropoid life (man), but not having the natural standard from which to measure, we do not know how much better the opposite course would have been, or just how much longer one would live under a perfectly natural regimen. The effects of flesh-eating have not been definitely known until recent years, but is now acknowledged by the most advanced authorities to be one of the greatest errors of civilized people, and will, within a few years, disappear from the catalog of human habits, when the great masses of people are made familiar with the chemistry of food, and how to secure vegetable instead of animal proteids and fats. MEAT