“We can claim no great right over land animals which are nourished with the same food, inspire the same air, wash in and drink the same water that we do ourselves; and when they are slaughtered they make us ashamed of our work by their terrible cries; and then, again, by living amongst us they arrive at some degree of familiarity and intimacy with us. But sea creatures are altogether strangers to us, and are brought up, as it were, in another world. Neither does their voice, look, or any service they have done us plead for their life. This kind of animals are of no use at all to us, nor is there any obligation upon us that we should love them. The element we inhabit is a hell to them, and as soon as ever they enter upon it they die.” We may infer that Plutarch advanced gradually to the perfect knowledge of the truth, and it is probable that his essay on _Flesh-eating_ was published at a comparatively late period in his life, since in some of his miscellaneous writings, in alluding to the subject, he speaks in less decided and emphatic terms of its barbarism and inhumanity: _e.g._, in his _Rules for the Preservation of Health_, while recommending moderation in eating, and professing abstinence from flesh, he does not so expressly denounce the prevalent practice. Yet he is sufficiently pronounced even here in favour of the reformed diet on the score of health:-- “Ill-digestion,” says he, “is most to be feared after flesh-eating, for it very soon clogs us and leaves ill consequences behind it. It would be best to accustom oneself _to eat no flesh at all_, for the earth affords plenty enough of things fit not only for nourishment but for delight and enjoyment; some of which you may eat without much preparation, and others you may make pleasant by adding various other things.” That the non-Christian humanitarian of the first century was far ahead--we will not say of his contemporaries, but of the common crowd of writers and speakers of the present age in his estimate of the just rights and position of the innocent non-human races--will be sufficiently apparent from the following extract from his remarkable essay entitled, _That the Lower Animals Reason_, to which Montaigne seems to have been indebted. The essay is in the form of a dialogue between Odysseus (Ulysses) and Gryllus, who is one of the transformed captives of the sorceress Circe (see _Odyssey_ ix.) Gryllus maintains the superiority of the non-human races generally in very many qualities and in regard to many of their habits--_e.g._, in eating and drinking:--