trial, so that a prejudice had to be dealt with, and every unfavourable symptom would certainly be noted, even without any intention to deal unfairly in the matter, so any listlessness would be yielded to perhaps a little more from being expected, or the expectation might even to some slight extent be the cause of it. But, from the limited knowledge we possess, we are inclined to ascribe still more of what is unfavourably reported to an influence of an adverse kind, that seems to have been present during the whole time. We have no wish to do the least injustice to the farm bailiff, nor to impute to him any wrong intentions, but at the same time we feel quite safe in stating that he has not given any encouragement to the men to persevere, or to make the best of the change. We would even guess that by shrugs, and nods, and in other ways, perhaps only by an expressive silence, he has strengthened any misgivings or objections that existed. To afford our readers a glimpse at the grounds of our guess we quote his own words.

"I will give you a simile: If you take a hunting horse, before the hunting season comes on, and feed him on bran, mashes, vetches, and other soft food, would it be as fit to hunt as if you had put it through a proper course of feeding on corn, and exercising it for its work? I say no; and yet the horse is as strong in the one case as in the other, but the soft feeding adds no vigour or zest to the system. It is just so with your workpeople; if you give them soft food they may have as much strength, but having no zest for their work they naturally conclude they are not so strong." Since all the men have been fed at the house of a gentleman with such a theory as the above, they have no doubt imbibed some portion of his views. We need scarcely point out how manifestly unfair the simile is, in taking food and exercise on the one hand, and food without exercise on the other. If, as the bailiff says, the two horses are equally strong, will not the difference of endurance be explained by the want of training in the one instance. But if the food be the cause, it is evident both horses are Vegetarians, and there is no imperative reason why Vegetarian food should not be as dry as a mixed diet. It does certainly appear that in this instance there has been a great quantity of milk, tea, coffee, &c., consumed in excess of the usual quantity, showing that they have entered largely into the Vegetarian dinners, but why this should be so we are at a loss to understand. The milk may pass, but why should there have been any increase in those dear and highly-taxed articles, tea and coffee? We are no anchorites, but tea and coffee form no part of our dinners, and we should much deprecate their frequent use on hygienic grounds. Is our friend aware, moreover, that 72 per cent of his famous solid food is equal to as much water taken from the nearest spring? These questions bring us to the financial part of this experiment. Without giving the several items as to exact quantity and value, we may enumerate the principal items used on the two systems, and the comparative expense. In the mixed diet animal food is as nearly as possible as 12.8 to 56 of the whole amount. The substitutes on the other system are butter and milk, amounting to nearly ten-twelfths of the value of flesh. Extra tea and sugar (quite unnecessary) bringing it up to the total value of the flesh. Beyond this there is an addition to the item of flour, which we are disposed to think an error, probably the charge relates to a longer time, which is increased one and a half times the whole amount. If this were true, the flour alone would almost make up the dry food discussed, as beef, &c., pound for pound, or if regarded as to the actual solid matter, there would be a very large increase in the amount consumed. on the Vegetarian system. At present the result shows an excess of expenditure under the latter règime equal to about twopence per head

per day, or 14d. against 12d. In conclusion, we wish to say to our friends that when it is proposed again to try a kindred experiment, we shall be glad to point out how to make the expense less than on a mixed diet, and at the same time have something substantial and good to offer. In the present case no idea of expense seems to have been kept in view, nor was there any motive to induce the manager of the experiment to make the result otherwise than it has proved.

"PUBLIC OPINION."

ALL lovers of truth and fair-play must have welcomed upon the platform of periodical literature a publication which professes to exhibit at one view both sides of each question introduced-and that without comments of its own. Public Opinion (which has been coming out weekly for more than two years) takes from the periodicals of the day the best articles on each side of current questions; and a reader must be most pertinaceously one-sided who can avoid reading all that is said for and against. | How the course of justice would be polluted and diverted if jurymen or judges were allowed to fix their opinions at any stage of the evidence, and to absent themselves from the remainder. Would that the trial of arguments were conducted with as much regard for justice as the trial of criminals! Strange to say, in most important matters-such as religion and politics-the greatest facilities for forming partial judgments are not only offered but insisted upon. We have pulpits and platforms confined to one man or one party, and those who dare to show any sign of even an inclination to argue beyond certain narrow fixed limits, are frowned down; and, if they persist, socially excommunicated. We have congregations and associations based upon certain narrow, fixed principles, and periodicals to disseminate those principles-and those principles only. If a person is known by his party to attend certain meetings or to read certain publications, he becomes a marked man. Too many avoid the perplexing, difficult-and, where bigotry prevails, excessively inconvenient—path of inquiry, and plunge too hastily into the pleasant stream of propagandism, where they find themselves gliding along in the company of multitudes who laugh at all their jokes, applaud all their speeches, and perhaps get up a testimonial for them. But alas for the candid inquirer! He often finds himself alone; he is perplexed by conflicting doubts; and he too often finds that the nearer he approaches to the truth which he loves, the more he is called upon to resign the social pleasures to which he has been accustomed, and perhaps even his very prospects in life. The world is afflicted with too much faith: we want more honest doubts. All hail, then, to Public Opinion, and every other publication that will honestly put the greatest possible difficulties in the way of being onesided-at least as far as the examination of evidence is concerned. But to our more immediate subject.

In the columns of Public Opinion various controversies have been carried on by correspondents respecting Homœopathy, Alcohol, Faith, &c., &c., and with a spirit of liberality and impartiality not often met with in periodicals addressed to so many classes of readers. It is to be hoped that ere long the subject of Vegetarianism will be discussed in its pages. Indeed, articles on "Diseased Meat," and various allusions in its extracts, seem to indicate that such a discussion would be highly

opportune. I will now give a few of the extracts to which I refer. The following are from the Daily News and Scotsman, of September 8th :

Mr. Simon's last annual report to the privy council on our sanitary condition, opens the eyes of the public to the disagreeable fact that as much as a fifth of the meat purchased for food in this country is diseased. Some investigations into the subject have been made, at Mr. Simon's request, by Mr. Gamgee, principal and professor of the Edinburgh New Veterinary College, and from these it appears that a good deal of the mischief is found in connection with the pork we get from Ireland. From forty to fifty thousand of the pigs reared in the sister island are measly, and the greater number of these come to Great Britain for consumption.

The question is of serious importance; for, according to the estimate of Mr. Gamgee, disease of one kind or other is fatal every year in the three kingdoms to about 375,000 cattle (nearly five per cent of the whole number), while in the case of sheep and pigs the proportion is, respectively, as far as can be ascertained, four per cent and three per cent. It is very certain that a large number of these animals are sold for food; and even of those beasts that are slaughtered many are already in a state of disease, and would probably die of their ailments if the butcher's knife did not anticipate the result.

It has been found in a large convict establishment that an epidemic of boils and carbuncles followed the use of meat from cattle afflicted with lung disease. Milk from unhealthy cows is also chargeable with some of the maladies which human beings have to endure. We may, in fact be said to live over again the lives of those animals from which we draw our sustenance, and to be healthy or diseased in proportion to the bodily condition of the creatures we rear for food. It was a quaint expression, but not an untruthful or ludicrous thought, on the part of the old mystical Sir Thomas Browne, when he said that all the flesh of our bodies has at one time been upon our platters.

It is shown by Professor Gamgee that in all our large towns upwards of fifty per cent per annum of the cows kept die or are slaughtered diseased.

The following is taken from an extract from the Morning Post, of August 29th:

Lord Carlisle pointed out in his Kilkenny speech that whereas there were in Great Britain only 201 persons at the last census who had attained the age of 100 years, there were in Ireland no less than 765 such favoured beings.

His Excellency did not attempt to explain this remarkable fact-still more remarkable when we take into consideration the very small population of Irelandbut the Drogheda Reporter, of August 29th, hints at a Vegetarian diet as the

cause

The English, too, live much on flesh, while the Irish live more on grain. In the opinion of many, the use of the latter tends to lengthen out our years, and of the former to shorten them.

Might not the Drogheda Reporter have mentioned potatoes as well as grain? There is reason for believing that the potato is more of a flesh-former than chemistry would seem to indicate. Dr. Lankester says-(See Guide to Food Collection, p. 21-"The potato, from its poverty in flesh-formers, is little nutritive; 100lbs. of fresh potatoes contain only 14lb. of flesh-forming matter." And, in a paper recently read to the British Association, Dr. Smith spoke very disparagingly of the potato as an article of diet.

I believe Smith's "Fruits and Farinacea " gives an instance where the prisoners in Wakefield jail were fed for several days with no solid food except potatoes; and a marked improvement was the result. How can this be accounted for on the supposition that potatoes are the almost worthless rubbish that chemistry and Dr. Smith make them out to be? The great defect of potatoes is the poverty of nitrogenous matter which all flesh-formers must contain; and it has been suggested that during the processes of mastication and insalivation the nitrogen of the atmosphere may be incorporated with the food, thus compensating in some degree for its chemical deficiencies. Whether this supposition be true or false, it certainly accounts satisfactorily for several dietary phenomena otherwise inexplicable. That the potato is a flesh-former to a greater extent than chemical tables seem to intimate, few

who eat potatoes largely will be disposed to doubt; and the writer of this, for one, protests against the abominable fashion of inviting a man to dinner, and then putting on his plate but a solitary specimen of the root whose merits and demerits we are discussing.

The following extract appeared recently in Public Opinion :

The Mayor of Blois has issued an order enjoining the butchers of that place to cover with a clean linen cloth all meat which they remove from the slaughter-houses to their shops. The Mayor of Blois is quite right. It is a disgusting sight to see the inverted, bleeding, eyeless carcases of slaughtered animals. What a volume might be written upon the "Esthetics of Vegetarianism," and the unmitigated disgust which the preparation of nearly every kind of animal food involves. Most shopkeepers can display taste in adorning their shop windows; but, alas for the butcher, how miserable and ghastly are his attempts at ornamentation! LEGO.

Selected Articles.

THALYSIE; OR, THE NEW EXISTENCE.

(Translated for the Dietetic Reformer.)

BUFFON, a king in the empire of letters, has decided this great question [of animal food] in a style which announces power and accompanies authority. Few words suffice for him to declare his judgment on the matter-for the opposite reason, I ought to be longer in my reply.

In one of his general discourses on Natural History, he affirms that man reduced to bread and vegetables for his sole nourishment would pass a feeble and languishing life, at least in our climate. He adds that man has not only need of being nourished, but also of being stimulated; and this observation is true in general of the people of Europe, for they are countries in which that counterpoise is required. But he is mistaken in his application, because it is a fact that meat strengthens the wolf, but does not strengthen the man; that is to say, that man cannot receive of it a sufficiently great quantity to be strengthened by it. He quotes, as proof of the insufficiency of purely vegetable nourishment, the feeble existence of a certain class of monks: "Those ghastly and pining men, shut up in those sacred walls, against which nature destroys herself." At these words I recall the applause which rang through Europe when they were first pronounced. The phrase is a fine one, doubtless, but the author never dreamt that, in comparing that horrible nature of which he spoke to the ocean with its tempests, he did not give us a very attractive view of it, and that one could not be too earnest in separating ourselves from it.

Let us add that nothing is less just than the expression which Buffon has used here to characterize the monks of La Trappe. They are pale, as all are who live in the shade of the cloister; they have somewhat of meagreness, as the plants which partake of their solitude, but they are not wan and still less weak; their minds above all are not so, they have all the vigour of which the appearances are sometimes refused to their bodies; but even if those pious monks were in the state of infirmity in which Buffon represents them, that would not be a reason for which to accuse the regimen; they are subjected to other influences much more powerful, and that an observer such as that facile naturalist should have been able to see. These are, besides that deprivation of light of which I have just spoken, excessive fasts, macerations of all sorts, frequent interruptions of sleep, and, above all, fixity of the thoughts, which dig their tombs much more than their hands. And yet. if, spite of such obstacles, the lives of those solitaires have been as long or even longer than those of other men, ought not the regimen to be freed in that respect from all reproach? Might we not even admit that it had been useful rather than hurtful, unless we are willing to maintain that fasts, macerations, &c., are proper

to prolong life. To make clear the fact of longevity, which is here most essential, let us take, for example, the lives of those two great chiefs of the order, since its reformation-Rancé and Gervaise; I see that the one lived 72 years and the other 91 years. And let us remark that their end was brought about by a cause foreign to the soil, both died of grief.*

He is not a friend of letters who has not heard speak of those celebrated men of Port Royal-des-Champs, who did not live with as much austerity as the monks of La Trappe, but with whom sobriety was the first virtue, and who besides, which is of importance in this place, did not eat flesh. We know the vigorous old age of Arnaud d'Audilly, who with the same hands that he wrote the "Vie des Pères du Désert," cultivated those fruits that would be relished at the tables of kings, as if they had been gathered from the gardens of the nobility. The great Arnaud, his brother, Lancelot, Nicole, Sacy, have lived many years on this regimen, in spite of persecutions without number, and in the midst of an atmosphere reputed unhealthy. Pascal, their illustrious friend, died young; but we know the unfortunate event which was the cause of the premature end of that great man. It will suffice for me to relate the great longevity of the fathers of the anchoret life. Some dates in fertile places, and in other places that manna or that sugar which flows naturally from the joints of the reed, formed their whole subsistence.

All who have any knowledge of the first centuries of Christian history are aware that there existed formerly, either in Egypt or the neighbouring desert, more than 100,000 cenobites, living in the way that Buffon calls death by anticipation. It will be objected, perhaps, that these cases are exceptional, because the men I have named inhabited temperate or hot climates; but I reply that austerities equal to those mentioned have been practised with success in the cold mountains of Armenia, and that in our own day the strict rules of St. Basil are followed with as much exactness and as happy results in the snows of Russia as in the black and burning deserts of Arabia. Nor need we be surprised at this, for virtue is of no clime, and cannot be confined to any; the appointment is of Nature. Climates produce varieties, but regimens produce discord.

Everybody has heard of Mount Athos, the celebrated mountain of Macedonia, and that it was to the Greek philosophers what the Campagna was to the Roman voluptuaries; there they meditated on science, raised as much above men by their thoughts as by their topographical position. To that population has succeeded another with whom I do not compare them, but they have this point of resemblance. These are the monks of the Greek faith, whose numerous monasteries occupy the most picturesque sites on the mountain, in place of the ancient towns, gardens, and retreats of pleasure. On this subject the new and old encyclopedias shall be allowed to speak+:-"There is a public market, which is held every Saturday, in a corner of the mountain, called Kares; there the monks come to exchange with each other, bread, fruits, and vegetables. All flesh meat is severely interdicted. They are all said to live to an extreme old age." Here we may appreciate the just value of climate, for the summit of this mountain is so high as, at a certain hour of the day, to cast a shadow twenty leagues in length.

Although the Egyptian caves are no longer occupied, that country still contains a considerable number of cenobites. There may be found, as in Arabia and Syria, many convents where the same discipline prevails as in Mount Athos. Father Sicard thus concludes the description he has given of that of Notre Dame des Suriens, the most considerable of them all. After relating their manner of life:"What is most surprising is that in spite of their great austerities these good men are strong and robust, tall and stout, and full of health."

These testimonies from persons all worthy of belief, all so concordant, reduce almost to nothing the assertion so carelessly made by Buffon.

* We have examples of a nearer time. The return of the monks of La Trappe, in 1815, has enabled his contemporaries to judge in this matter as to the truth of Buffon's assertions. At the head of this mcdest troop were observed men of an age almost as great as that of Father Gervaise, and who were exempt from every species of infirmity. Travellers who have visited them in their solitude have been singularly struck with the freshness and serenity of their countenances, the air of contentment that surrounded them, and above all their agreeable physiognomy, of which the world has no equal. The following anecdote may serve to illustrate this. One of these Fathers who was consulted by visitors from far and near, remarked a young man who often accompanied others on these occasions but always preserved a profound silence. One day the solitaire addressed him kindly asking if he had no question to put. No, father, answered the young man; it is sufficient for me to look at you. See "Lettres édifiantes," v. 5, p. 50.

+ See article on Mount Athos.