“And yet Man might, like other animals, live upon vegetables. _Flesh is not a better nourishment than grains or bread._ What constitutes true nourishment, what contributes to the nutrition, to the development, to the growth, and to the support of the body, is not that brute matter which, to our eyes, composes the texture of flesh or of vegetables, but it is those organic molecules which both contain; since the ox, in feeding on grass, acquires as much flesh as man or as animals who live upon flesh and blood.... The essential source is the same; it is the same matter, it is the same organic molecules which nourish the Ox, Man, and all animals.... It results from what we have just said that Man, whose stomach and intestines are not of a very great capacity relatively to the volume of his body, could not live simply upon grass. Nevertheless _it is proved by facts that he could well live upon bread, vegetables, and the grains of plants_, since we know entire nations and classes of men to whom religion forbids to feed upon anything that has life.” To the ordinary apprehension all this might seem _primâ facie_ conclusive evidence of the non-necessariness of the food of the richer classes of the community. But, unhappily, Buffon seems to have considered himself as holding a brief to defend his clients, the flesh-eaters, in the last resort, and, accordingly, in spite of these admissions, which to an unbiassed mind might appear conclusive argument for the relinquishment of flesh as food, he proceeds to contradict himself by adding:-- “But these examples, supported even by the authority of Pythagoras [and he might have added many later names of equal authority], and recommended by some physicians too friendly to a reformed diet (_trop amis de diète!_), appear to me not sufficient to convince us that it would be for the advantage of human health (_qu’il y eût à gagner pour la santè des hommes_) and for the multiplication of the human species to live upon vegetables and bread only, for so much the stronger reason, that the poor country people, whom the luxury of the cities and towns and the extravagant waste of tables reduce to this mode of living, languish and die off sooner than persons of the middle class, to whom inanition and excess are equally unknown!”[184] In stigmatising, in the following sentence, the cruel rapacity of the lower carnivorous tribes, Buffon consciously or unconsciously stamps the same stigma upon the carnivorous human animal:-- “_After Man_, the animals who live only upon flesh are the greatest destroyers. They are at once the enemies of Nature and the rivals of Man.”[185] XXX. HAWKESWORTH. 1715-1773.