Although, as has already been indicated, Michelet evidently had not examined the _scientific_ basis of akreophagy, yet all his aspirations and all his sympathies, it is also equally evident, were for the bloodless diet. With Locke and Rousseau, and many others before him, he presses upon mothers the vital import of not perverting the early preferences of their children for the foods prescribed by unsophisticated nature and their own truer instincts. In one of his books, the most often republished, in laying down rules for the education of young girls, he thus writes:-- “Purity, above everything, _in regimen and nourishment_. What are we to understand by this? “I understand by it that the young girl should have the proper nourishment of a child--that she should continue the mild, tranquilising, unexciting regimen of milk; that, if she eats at your table, she will be accustomed not to touch the dishes upon it, which for her, at least, are poisons. “A revolution has taken place. We have quitted the more sober French regimen, and have adopted more and more the coarse and bloody diet of our neighbours, appropriate to their climate much more than to ours. The worst of it all is that we inflict this manner of living upon our children. Strange spectacle! To see a mother giving her daughter, whom but yesterday she was suckling at her breast, this gross aliment of bloody meats, and the dangerous excitant wine! She is astonished to see her violent, capricious, passionate; but it is herself whom she ought to accuse as the cause. What she fails to perceive, and yet what is very grave, is that with the French race, so precocious, the arousing of the passions is so directly provoked by this food. Far from strengthening, it agitates, it weakens, it unnerves. The mother thinks it fine (_plaisant_) to have a child so preternaturally mature. All this comes from herself. Unduly excitable, she wishes her child to be such another as she, and she is, without knowing it, the corruptress of her own daughter. “All this [unnatural stimulation] is of no good to her, and is little better for you, Madame. You have not the heart, you say, to eat anything in which she has no share. Ah, well! abstain yourself, or, at all events, moderate your indulgence in this food, good, possibly, for the hard-worked man, but fatal in its consequences to the woman of ease and leisure--regimen which _vulgarises_ her, perturbs her, renders her irritable, or oppresses her with indigestion.