d that
the same preference for cannibalism exists in spiders, many insects,
fishes, and even higher animals.

Another line of argument by which some advocates of vegetarianism
appeal to the popular judgment is by representing flesh-food derived
from animals as something dirty, foul, and revolting, full of microbic
germs, whilst vegetable products are extolled as being clean and
sweet--free from odour and putrescence and from the scaremonger's
microbes. This, I perhaps need hardly say, is a gigantic illusion and
misrepresentation. I came across it the other day in a very
unreasonable pamphlet on food by the American writer, Mr. Upton
Sinclair. Putrefactive microbes attack vegetable foods and produce
revolting smells and poisons in them, just as they do in foods of
animal origin. It is true that on the whole more varieties of
vegetable food can be kept dry and ready for use by softening with hot
water than is the case with foods prepared from animals. This is only
a question of not keeping food too long or in conditions tending to
the access of putrefactive bacteria. It is, on the whole, more usual
and necessary, in order to render it palatable, to apply heat to
flesh, fish, and fowl than to fruits. And it is by heat--heat of the
temperature of boiling water--applied for ten minutes or more, that
poison-producing and infective bacteria are killed and rendered
harmless. More people have become infected by deadly parasites and
have died from cholera and similar diseases, through having taken the
germs of those diseases into their stomachs with raw and over-ripe
fruit or uncooked vegetables and the manured products of the kitchen
garden, than have suffered from the presence of disease-germs or
putrefactive bacteria in well-cooked meat. Here, in fact, "cooking"
makes all the difference, just as it does in the matter we were
discussing above of the fitness of flesh and bone for trituration by
man's teeth.

[Illustration: Plate VI.--The series of teeth in the upper (1) and
lower jaw (2) of a modern European (natural size). The teeth are
placed closely side by side without a gap--an arrangement which does
not occur in the apes nor in any other living mammal, although it is
found in some extinct herbivores--the Anoplotherium and the
Arsinoeitherium. The shape of the arch formed by the row of teeth
should be compared with that shown by the same arch in the Gibbon (Pl.
VII). The crowns of the teeth are very carefully drawn in th