THE DANGER OF EXCESS OF PROTEIN To mention the greatest danger from using meat for nutrition first, we find it almost impossible to eat most meats without taking into the organism more protein (nitrogen) than is required for repair of the broken-down tissues; and we now know that any excess of protein or nitrogen imposed upon the body is not good for it. Large excess is positively deadly in its final effects, and many, if not all of the so-called uric-acid troubles or diseases are traced to such abuse. Not only are the kidneys worn out long before their time, but high blood-pressure is one of the baleful results that lead to untimely demise. To be sure, persons are reported to have lived to near or quite an hundred years of age as habitual _meat_ers, but their occupations or activities have been favourable to burning up the dregs of metabolism, and the belief is reasonable that if they had not been thus self-abusing during the first century of their life they might have gone quite a piece into the second century with their matured experience, example, and wisdom, serving the world to good advantage. THE USE OF MEAT That meat is an emergency expedient in the natural nutrition of man is pretty certain. Strictly speaking, we are all of us subsisting on meat all of the time, but it is only _one degree removed from the vegetable kingdom_, when we ingest only the first fruits of the soil, as vegetarians do, and make meat of it within us. The vegetable nutriment is transformed into our own flesh and blood in the form of fat chiefly, and then is used to furnish whatever heat and repair material we happen to need. When second-hand, already dead and decomposing meat is eaten and thus used for life-giving purposes, it is really not only second-hand supply but third-hand material. For instance, we may subsist exclusively on vegetable or farinaceous material and get our repair or fuel supply from such sources only. The result is, in part, the forming of the walls of our own stomach. These walls are meat. Should we turn into cannibals, devouring each other as the Pacific (?) Islanders used to treat missionaries and enemies, the stomach walls become tripe and are easily digestible. While they were live walls, holding in place glands secreting powerful gastric juice, they resisted the digestive aggression of their own juice, but the moment they were separated from their own living combination, quite similar gastric juice digested them as quickly as it does the white meat of a pet chicken. It is physiologically possible to cut out a part or the whole of our own stomach, and then devour and digest it as tripe in the small intestines. Hence it is that we are all _meat_ers, perforce, but not all of us are third-degree-removed cannibals. What we call "pure vegetarians" are only second-hand _meat_ers.