“I wish there was a science of nutrition worthy of the name,” writes Bernard Shaw in a private letter. “The mass of special pleading on behalf of meat eating on the one side and vegetarianism on the other, which calls itself the science of metabolism to-day, seems to me to be so corrupt as to be worthless.” The fact that Shaw himself is a perfervid vegetarian lends additional significance to this statement. Until quite recently the advocacy of either dietary has been based upon considerations the opposite of physiologic. It has been the sentimental aspects of the controversy—vegetable versus animal foods—which have received most emphasis. The vegetarian supported his position on the ethical ground that the eating of animal food, involving as it does the taking of life, is wrong. On the other hand, the advocate of meat eating based his arguments on the support given to it by common custom, and a belief that a meat diet is that which supplies vigor and manly force. As Dr. Woods Hutchinson, the most prominent of the champions of meat eating, puts the case: “Vegetarianism is the diet of the enslaved, stagnant, and conquered races, and a diet rich in meat is that of the progressing, the dominant and the conquering strains. The rise of any nation in civilization is invariably accompanied by an increasing abundance in food supplies from all possible sources, both vegetable and animal.” At the same time, even Dr. Hutchinson admits that human life can be maintained upon a vegetarian diet. “Nearly one-half of the human race,” he writes, “has been compelled from sheer necessity to prove that thesis in its actual experience; but we find absolutely no jot of evidence in support of the contention that there is any advantage or superiority in the vegetable diet as such—no more than that there is any inherent superiority in a pure animal diet as such.... There is no valid or necessary ground, so far as we have been able to discover, for the exclusion of any known article of food, whether vegetable or animal, from our diet list in health.”