“If, then, it is true that our ordinary diet consists chiefly of foods rich in albumen and phosphoric acid but poor in soda, and that in consequence of this a tendency towards the accumulation of uric acid in the body is pretty generally found, the very slightest extra strain on the system will be sufficient to cause a precipitation of uric acid and uric acid salts in the body. This result is very often brought about by a chronic acid catarrh of the stomach, which in its turn depends upon dysæmia, and is in 95 out of 100 cases the predecessor of gout. The fermentation acids, especially oxybutyric acid (which is found in the urine both in acid catarrh of the stomach and in diabetes mellitus), combine with some of the alkalies of the blood, and thus lessen its alkalescence (basic character); and as catarrh of the bowels and periodic diarrhœas are frequently associated with acid catarrh of the stomach, these bases may be even directly excreted in the stools, and thus the quantity of alkalies in the blood be further diminished. “Now we find that men consuming vegetable food form only small quantities of uric acid, herbivorous animals as well as carnivorous hardly any, but men living on flesh-food very large quantities, we must come to the conclusion that _men cannot properly manage flesh-food_. The organism of the flesh-eating animal has the faculty of completely digesting flesh-food, whereas the organism of man is unable to accomplish this. Consequently man cannot be classed as carnivorous and cannot eat flesh unpunished....