Page:Linda Hazzard - Fasting for the cure of disease.djvu/192

 the time it is consumed as food, decay has progressed almost to the point of putrefaction. In the fast it is observed that excessive meat eaters and patients who previously have undergone the "Salisbury treatment" with its forced feeding of flesh, exhibit a foulness in elimination so much beyond that in all other cases that it renders them obnoxious even to themselves.

Mr. Otto Carque in his "Errors of Bio-Chemistry" says: "There is also a marked physiological difference between plant and animal food. Animals are distinguished from vegetables by incessant decay in every tissue, a decay which is proportional to animal activity. This incessant decay necessitates incessant repair, so that the animal body has been likened to a temple on which two opposite forces are at work in every part, the one tearing down, the other repairing the breach as fast as it is made. In plants no such incessant decay has ever been discovered. If it exists at all, it must be very trifling in comparison. Protoplasm, it is true, is taken from the older parts of the plant, and these parts die; but the protoplasm does not seem to decompose, but is used again for tissue building. Thus the eternal activity of animals is