healthy. It is, therefore, to me, a matter of
surprise, to find some of them in favor of the said prescribed course of
regimen, both for students and laborers, and many of them in favor of
the discontinuance of animal food by students. Those who have themselves
made the experiment, with hardly an exception, are decidedly in favor of
a vegetable regimen for all classes of mankind, particularly the
sedentary. And in regard to the necessity of diminishing the proportion
of animal food consumed by all classes, there seems to be but one voice.

On one more important point there is a very general concurrence of
opinion. I allude to the choice of articles from the vegetable kingdom.
The farinacea are considered as the best; especially wheat, ground
without bolting. The preference of Dr. Preston is an exception; and
there are one or two others.

On the whole--I repeat it--the testimony is far more favorable to the
"prescribed course of regimen," both for the healthy and diseased than
under the circumstances connected with the inquiry the most
thorough-going vegetable eater could possibly have anticipated. If this
is a fair specimen--and I know no reason why it may not be regarded as
such--of the results of similar experiments and similar observations
among medical men throughout our country, could their observations and
experiments be collected, it certainly confirms the views which some
among us have long entertained on this subject, and which will be still
more strongly confirmed by evidence which will be produced in the
following chapters. Had similar efforts been made forty or fifty years
ago, to ascertain the views of physicians and others respecting the
benefits or safety of excluding wine and other fermented drinks in the
treatment of several diseases, in which not one in ten of our modern
practitioners would now venture to use them, as well as among the
healthy, I believe the results would have been of a very different
character. The opinions, at least, of the physicians themselves, would
most certainly have been, nearly without a dissenting voice, that the
entire rejection of wine and fermented liquors was dangerous to the
sick, and unsafe to many of the healthy, especially the hard laborer.
And there is quite as much reason to believe that animal food will be
discarded from our tables in the progress of a century to come, as there
was, in 1800, for believing that all drinks but water would be laid
aside in the progre