“There is a difference,” observes Chalmers, “between such truths as are merely of a speculative nature, and such as are allied with practice and moral feeling. With the former, all repetition may be often superfluous; with the latter, it may just be by earnest repetition that their influence comes to be thoroughly established over the mind of the inquirer.” These words are particularly true when applied to the subject matter before us. No matter how perfect, theoretically, an argument may be, it will never appeal to the public mind as do a few concrete facts. The arguments I have presented, drawn from comparative anatomy, from physiology, chemistry, and from hygiene, would weigh but little in many minds against the testimony of human experience. They would contend that, no matter how good the theoretical argument might be, the facts, nevertheless, would seem to prove the contrary; and show that the majority of all the more civilised people of the earth, particularly the ruling and governing nations, _do_, as a matter of fact, eat meat; and hence, practically, meat is a suitable article of diet. I propose to consider these arguments in the following chapter, and see how far they rest upon facts, and how far upon misconception. Pythagoras, one of the most celebrated philosophers of antiquity, was one of the first to defend the “vegetable diet.” He not only totally refrained from animal food himself, but also strictly prohibited the use of it by his disciples, so that those who abstain from it at the present time are sometimes known as Pythagorians. Pythagoras flourished about five hundred years before the Christian era. He was a man of immense learning, and extraordinary powers of intellect. He was the first demonstrator of the forty-seventh problem of the first book of Euclid, and entertained correct views of the solar system. Ovid speaks of him with great admiration. Zeno, the Stoic, Diogenes, the Cynic, Plato, Plutarch, Plautus, Proclus, Empedocles, Socrates, Quintus Sextus, Apollonius of Tyana, Porphyry, and numerous others, among the ancients, abstained from animal food and, more recently, Haller, Ritson (celebrated for his numerous works and varied talents), Dr Cheyne, Dr Lambe, Mr Newton (who wrote a splendid book, “The Return to Nature”), Shelley, Dr Hufeland, Sir Richard Phillips, and many others have both advocated and personally tried for many years a strictly and exclusively vegetable diet. Hesiod, the Greek poet, Herodotus, Hippocrates, Pliny, Galen, and many other writers of antiquity could be quoted as defending a simple, non-flesh diet. Of late years numerous scientific men and physicians have come forward in support of this claim; and their testimony will be found in various parts of this work.