The flesh-eaters were Yale men, including some of the best known athletes of the university. The abstainers were nurses and physicians attached to the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Professor Fisher’s interest in the subject was that of a political economist. Meats, as a general rule, are the most expensive part of the national diet, and it is apparent that if a fleshless, or low proteid, diet will increase endurance, it will also increase the national earning capacity, and thus add to the national wealth. When Professor Fisher began his experiments he encountered a singular fact, which was that the science of physiology had given very little attention to the study of endurance. “That strength and endurance are not identical, is only partly recognized,” he writes. “The strength of the muscle is measured by the utmost force that it can exert once; its endurance, by the number of times it can repeat any exertion within its strength. The repetition of such exertion, if not stopped by the refusal of the will, is finally stopped by the reduction of the strength of the muscle till it is unable to perform further. Thus endurance may be expressed in terms of loss of strength. It is related to fatigue, and it is only through the study of fatigue and fatigue poisons, made by Mosso and others, that light has been thrown on the nature of endurance.” When these tests were held Professor Fisher had not then invented the machine for registering endurance which is now in use in the Yale gymnasium; therefore, three simple tests were employed: first, holding the arms horizontal as long as possible; second, deep knee bending; third, leg raising with the subject lying on his back. VICTORY FOR THE LOW PROTEID DIET The results of the competitive tests were all in favor of the flesh-abstaining athletes. In the first test, which was holding the arms horizontal, only two of the fifteen flesh-eaters succeeded in holding their arms out over a quarter of an hour; whereas twenty-two of the thirty-two abstainers surpassed that limit. None of the flesh-eaters reached half an hour, but fifteen of the thirty-two abstainers exceeded that limit. Of these, nine exceeded one hour, four exceeded two hours, and one exceeded three hours, the last going exactly two hundred minutes, or three hours and twenty minutes. In the leg raising test the record showed little difference. None of the abstainers reached their absolute limits. The highest record for the abstainers was one thousand times. A flesh-eater reached one thousand, three hundred and two, but did so after the one-thousand mark had already been set for him by an abstainer, and he went into the test with the expressed intention of defeating his rival. Professor Fisher states that it was evident from his fatigue at the end of the test that he could not have repeated the performance on the next day, as did his flesh-abstaining rival.