“Do you think me a cannibal?” is the remark often made by a cheery flesh-eater, when enjoying his roast beef in the presence of a vegetarian; and it may not be denied that such is the thought which commonly suggests itself, for the more highly developed nonhuman animals are very closely akin to man. “We do not eat negroes,” says Mr. W. H. Hudson, “although their pigmented skin, flat feet and woolly heads proclaim them a different species--even monkey’s flesh is abhorrent to us, merely because we fancy that that creature, in its ugliness, resembles some old men and some women and children that we know. But the gentle, large-brained social cow ... we slaughter and feed on her flesh--monsters and cannibals that we are.” No apology, then, shall be made for the heading of this chapter. There is a very real likeness, not only between anthropophagy and other forms of flesh-eating, but between the excuses offered by cannibals and those offered by flesh-eaters. Forty years ago, the possibility of living healthily on a non-flesh diet was by no means so generally admitted as it is now; and consequently very naïve and artless objections used to be advanced against abstinence from butcher’s-meat. Mr. Kegan Paul told me that he had once heard a lady say to F. W. Newman: “But, Professor, don’t you feel very weak?” to which the Professor sturdily replied: “Madam, feel my calves.” “What on earth do you live on?” used to be a frequent question at Eton in those days, the implication being that there is no “variety” in the vegetarian diet; an amusing complaint, in view of what Richard Jefferies has described as “the ceaseless round of mutton and beef to which the dead level of civilization [_sic_] reduces us.” So obvious is this monotony in the orthodox repasts that the _Spectator_, a good many years ago, published an article headed, “Wanted, a New Meat,” in which it was explained that what is needed is some new and large animal, something which “shall combine the game flavour with the substantial solidity of a leg of mutton.” The _Spectator’s_ choice ultimately fell upon the eland, but not before the claims of various other “neglected animals,” among them the wart-hog, had been conscientiously debated.