keys, on easily crushed fruits, nuts, and roots.'

With regard to man's original non-carnivorous nature and omnivorism, it
is sometimes said that though man's system may not thrive on a raw flesh
diet, yet he can assimilate cooked flesh and his system is well adapted
to digest it. The answer to this is that were it demonstrable, and it is
_not_, that cooked flesh is as easily digested and contains as much
nutriment as grains and nuts, this does not prove it to be suitable for
human food; for man (leaving out of consideration the fact that the
eating of diseased animal flesh can communicate disease), since he was
originally formed by Nature to subsist exclusively on the products of
the vegetable kingdom, cannot depart from Nature's plan without
incurring penalty of some sort--unless, indeed, his natural original
constitution has changed; but _it has not changed_. The most learned and
world-renowned scientists affirm man's present anatomical and
physiological structure to be that of a frugivore. Disguising an
unnatural food by cooking it may make that food more assimilable, but it
by no means follows that such a food is suitable, let alone harmless, as
human food. That it is harmful, not only to man's physical health, but
to his mental and moral health, this book endeavours to demonstrate.

With regard to the fact that man has not changed constitutionally from
his original frugivorous nature Dr. Haig writes as follows: 'If man
imagines that a few centuries, or even a few hundred centuries, of
meat-eating in defiance of Nature have endowed him with any new powers,
except perhaps, that of bearing the resulting disease and degradation
with an ignorance and apathy which are appalling, he deceives himself;
for the record of the teeth shows that human structure has remained
unaltered over vast periods of time.'

According to Dr. Haig, human metabolism (the process by which food is
converted into living tissue) differs widely from that of the
carnivora. The carnivore is provided with the means to dispose of such
poisonous salts as are contained in and are produced by the ingestion of
animal flesh, while the human system is not so provided. In the human
body these poisons are not held in solution, but tend to form deposits
and consequently are the cause of diseases of the arthritic group,
conspicuously rheumatism.

There is sometimes some misconception as regards the distinction between
a frugivorous and herbivorous diet. The