Another great argument which has always been advanced in favour of meat-eating, or the ingestion of proteid in the form of animal, as opposed to vegetable food, is that the proteid derived from the animal is far more quickly and readily assimilated by the system than vegetable proteid. The _rapidity_ of the digestion of animal food has always been urged as one of the strongest arguments in its favour, and it is largely for this reason that it has been administered to invalids, and to patients in a depressed and weakened state of body. But now we find that physiological research has completely disproved this old dogma! Professor Chittenden, on p. 30 of his “Nutrition and Man,” says: “It is evident from what has been stated that the gastric digestion of proteid foods _is a comparatively slow process_, involving several hours of time; and further, that food material in general remains in the stomach for varying periods, dependent upon its chemical composition.... It is a mistake to assume that the digestion of proteid foods is complete in the stomach. Stomach digestion is to be considered more as a preliminary step, paving the way for further changes to be carried forward by the combined action of intestinal and pancreatic juice in the small intestines.... The importance of gastric digestion is frequently overrated.” Dr Sylvester Graham, writing on this subject years ago in his “Science of Human Life,” said: “In vain have they attempted to regulate the diet of man on the chemical principles, and insisted on the necessity for certain chemical properties in the human element to sustain the vital economy. That economy has shown them that it can triumph over the chemical affinities and ordinary laws of organic matter, and bend them to its purposes at pleasure; generating and transmuting from one form to another, with the utmost ease, the substance which human science calls elements; and while the living organs retain their functional power and integrity, elaborating from every kind of element on which an animal can subsist, a chyle so nearly identical in its physical and chemical character, that the most accurate analytical chemists can scarcely detect the least appreciable difference.... Though, while the health and integrity of the assimilating organs are preserved, the physical and _chemical_ character of the chyle are nearly identical, whatever may be the elementary substance from which it was elaborated, yet the _vital_ constitution of the chyle and blood, and consequently of the solids, is greatly affected by the quality of the food. When chyle is taken from the living vessels, the vital constitution of that which is elaborated from flesh meat is capable of resisting the action of bacterial decomposition only a short time, and will begin to putrefy in three or four days at the longest; while the vital constitution of that which is elaborated from pure and proper