“He resolved, therefore, finally to execute what he had been contemplating for some time--to abandon animal food altogether, and everything analogous to it, and to confine himself wholly to vegetable food. This determination he put in execution the second week of February, 1806, and he has adhered to it with perfect regularity to the present time. His only subject of repentance with regard to it has been that it had not been adopted much earlier in life. He never found the smallest real ill-consequence from this change. He sank neither in strength, flesh, nor in spirits. He was at all times of a very thin and slender habit, and so he has continued to be, but upon the whole he has rather gained than lost flesh. He has experienced neither indigestion nor flatulence even from the sort of vegetables which are commonly thought to produce flatulence, nor has the stomach suffered from any vegetable matter, though unchanged by culinary art or uncorrected by condiments. The only unpleasant consequence of the change was a sense of emptiness of stomach, which continued many months. In about a year, however, he became fully reconciled to the new habit, and felt as well satisfied with his vegetable meal as he had been formerly with his dinner of flesh. He can truly say that since he has acted upon this resolution no year has passed in which he has not enjoyed better health than in that which preceded it. But he has found that the changes introduced into the body by a vegetable regimen take place with extreme slowness; that it is in vain to expect any _considerable_ amendment in successive weeks or in successive months. We are to look rather to the intervals of _half-years or years_.” With extreme candour as well as carefulness, this patient and philosophic experimentalist details every particular circumstance of his own _diagnosis_. After a minute report of the various symptoms of his maladies and his gradual subjugation of them, he deduces the only just inference:--