If the truth or importance of any Principle or Feeling is to be measured, not by its popularity, indeed--not by the _quod ab omnibus_--but by the extent of its recognition by the most refined and the most earnest thinkers in all the most enlightened times--by the _quod a sapientibus_--the value of no principle has better been established than that which insists upon the vital importance of a radical reform in Diet. The number of the protesters against the barbarism of human living who, at various periods in the known history of our world, have more or less strongly denounced it, is a fact which cannot fail to arrest the attention of the most superficial inquirer. But a still more striking characteristic of this large body of protestation is the _variety_ of the witnesses. Gautama Buddha and Pythagoras, Plato and Epikurus, Seneca and Ovid, Plutarch and Clement (of Alexandria), Porphyry and Chrysostom, Gassendi and Mandeville, Milton and Evelyn, Newton and Pope, Ray and Linné, Tryon and Hecquet, Cocchi and Cheyne, Thomson and Hartley, Chesterfield and Ritson, Voltaire and Swedenborg, Wesley and Rousseau, Franklin and Howard, Lambe and Pressavin, Shelley and Byron, Hufeland and Graham, Gleïzès and Phillips, Lamartine and Michelet, Daumer and Struve--such are some of the more or less famous, or meritorious, names in the Past to be found among the prophets of Reformed Dietetics, who, in various degrees of abhorrence, have shrunk from the _régime_ of blood. Of many of those who have revolted from it, it may almost be said that they revolted _in spite of themselves_--in spite, that is to say, of the most cherished prejudices, traditions, and sophisms of Education.