“They will become not only more robust but more beautiful; that their carriage will be erect, their step firm; that their development at a critical period of youth, the prematurity of which has been considered an evil, will be retarded; that, above all, the danger of being deprived of them will in every way diminish; while by these light repasts their hilarity will be augmented, and their intellects cleared in a degree which shall astonishingly illustrate the delightful effects of this regimen.... I will beg here to attempt an answer in this place to that trite and specious objection to Dr. Lambe’s opinions that ‘what is suitable to one constitution may be not so to another.’ If there be a single person existing, whose health would not be improved by the vegetable diet and distilled water, then the whole system falls at once to the ground. The question is simply, whether fruits and other vegetables be not the natural sustenance of man, who would have occasion for no other drink than these afford, and whose thirst is at present excited by an unnatural flesh diet, which causes his disorders bodily and mentally.... Another objection sometimes urged is this: ‘If children, brought up on a vegetable regimen, should at a future period of their lives adopt a flesh diet, they will certainly suffer more from the change than they otherwise would have done.’ The very contrary of this, I conceive, would happen. The stomach is so fortified by the general increase of health, that a person thus nourished is enabled to bear what one whose humours are less impaired would sink under. The children of our family can each of them eat a dozen or eighteen walnuts for supper without the most trifling indigestion, an experiment which those who feed their children in the usual manner would consider it adventurous to attempt. So also the Irish porters in London bear these alterations of diet successfully, and owe much of their actual vigour to the vegetable food of their forefathers, and to their own, before they emigrated from Ireland, where, in all probability, they did not taste flesh half-a dozen times in the year.”