The first advocate of a purely vegetable diet was Pythagoras, the Samian philosopher. His discourse delivered at Crotona, a city of Magna Graecia, is ably reported for posterity by the poet Ovid. From what materials he made up his report, it is impossible now to say. Pythagoras says that flesh-eaters make their stomachs the sepulchres of the lower animals, the cemeteries of beasts. About thirty years ago there was a vegetable diet movement hereabouts, which created some excitement at the time. Its adherents were variously denominated as Grahamites, and, from the fact of their using bread made of unbolted wheat-meal, bran-eaters. There was little of muscular Christianity in them. They were a pale, harmless set of valetudinarians, who were, like all weakly persons, morbidly alive to their own bodily states, and principally employed in experimenting on the effects of various insipid articles of diet. Tea and coffee were tabooed by these people. Ale and wine were abominations in their Index Expurgatorius of forbidden _ingesta_. The presence of a boiled egg on their breakfast-tables would cause some of the more sensitive of these New England Brahmins to betake themselves to their beds for the rest of the day. They kept themselves in a semi-famished state on principle. One of the most liberal and latitudinarian of the sect wrote, in 1835,--"For two years past I have abstained from the use of all the diffusible stimulants, using no animal food, either flesh, fish, or fowl, nor any alcoholic or vinous spirits, no form of ale, beer, or porter, no cider, tea, or coffee; but using milk and water as my only liquid aliment, and feeding sparingly, or rather moderately, upon farinaceous food, vegetables, and fruit, seasoned with unmelted butter, slightly boiled eggs, and sugar and molasses, with no condiment but common salt."