Page:Manchester Vegetarian Lectures (Second Series) (1889).pdf/13

, who once expressed her Utmost astonishment when told that cucumbers did not grow in slices. (Laughter.) The subject that has been given to me, rather than chosen, is a very wide one. It is. astonishing how oddly some people look upon matters of food. Some very questionable elements are classed under that distinctive appellation. We are not going to considers the whole lot of foods that would suggest themselves, but the foods from the vegetable kingdom; and I would like to call your attention to the fact that it is a very wonderful kingdom indeed. Coming between the mineral on the one hand, and thé animal upon the other, it is, I think, the only kingdom from which man can be fed entirely and completely. I know that man could not live entirely upon the mineral kingdom, and I do not think man could entirely live upon the animal kingdom; but on the products of the vegetable king- dom man can live, and, as some of us think, live well. (Hear, hear.) People often say to me, “I don’t know whatever you find to eat.” I do not know whether their doubts are to some extent founded on a due sense of my proportions—(laughter)—but I rather think they are chiefly the result of a very prevalent habit of regarding each meal as consisting of the dish of animal food which has characterised it. Now you ask people what they have had for dinner, they always say, when pork has formed a part of the meal, “I had pork;” and if they have quite a wealth of pies and puddings and only one slice of beef, you are always told that they had beef for dinner; and thus by a trick of speech an undue prominence is given to the value of animal food.

I will begin by saying something about the distribution of food plants in the vegetable kingdom, which is divided into two great parts, namely, the phanerogamas, or flowering plants, and the cryptogams, or plants that do not flower. To the former of those great divisions we are mainly indebted for the various vegetable foods, though to the latter class belong the mushroom and a few other plants which form an important element in the food supply of our country, affording, I believe, from the grower’s point of view, one of the most profitable of the present day crops. With these exceptions, however, our food supplies are obtained from the flowering plants, I will, therefore, enumerate the different parts of the flowering plant, stating which of them supply ‘the different vegetable foods. The poet Wordsworth says, “The child is father to the man"indeed, not only is the child father to the man, but the child is the man. Similarly, in considering the plant with the seed, we may say that the seed is the plant. Within the seed lies the rudimentary germ of, life, complete and intact.

The production of their seed is the destined purpose of the flowers of the