To one accustomed to obtain his supply of protoplasm chiefly from the bones of other animals instead of from the kingdom of the plant, the assertion that it is possible not only to sustain but to enhance existence on a fleshless diet seems very strange. It is not strange that such an assertion should seem strange. Anything is strange to the uninitiated. And the amount of ignorance on this subject is well-nigh pitiable. The delusion that flesh is the most genuine source of human energy has become so fixed that it actually disturbs the respiration of nineteen out of twenty to be told that flesh compared with many foods is a dilute form of nutrition, and that more than half the inhabitants of the earth today are practical and prosperous vegetarians. There is no reason known to science or experience why human beings may not keep up as profitable and as interesting an existence without flesh as with it. In fact, after an experience of four years and a rather careful contemplation of the matter, I assert that physiological integrity may be more accurately sustained by a judicious diet of fruits, grains, vegetables, and nuts than by a diet in which carrion is a distinguished constituent. Man is not naturally a carnivorous animal. He has evolved from the frugivorous anthropoids, and has a long biological ancestry of vegetarians. His mouth, digestive organs, skin structure, and modes of life are all unadapted to a carnivorous life. Man has probably adopted predatory habits almost within historic times. Not only the student and the thinker but the manual laborer as well is benefited by a fleshless regimen. A breakfast of oatmeal and cream, a couple of eggs on toast, whole wheat muffins and butter, and a nice rich apple or banana is much more civilized, nutritious and economical than a breakfast in which bloody beef plays chief role. The most successful burden bearers of the world today are vegetarians. The Turkish longshoremen, perhaps the most powerful bipeds on the planet (except the gorilla), are lifelong vegetarians. They will pick up a burden of six or eight hundred pounds and walk away with it with no more effort than is made by a meat-eating Englishman in carrying two hundred. De Lesseps said that the Suez Canal, the greatest engineering achievement ever accomplished on the earth, never could have been finished, on account of the heat and the slavish character of the labor, by meat-eating Europeans. It had to be done by the barley-feeding Bedouins and Armenians. De Lesseps became a vegetarian and remained one to his death, from his experiences in the building of the Suez Canal. The peasantry of Russia, Italy, Germany, Ireland, and even Norway and Sweden away from the coast, are largely vegetarians. So, also, are millions in the Orient.