Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/98

86  to a butcher in Jermyn Street. This animal, for some reason, had been spared in its lambhood, and was reared as the butcher's pet. It was well known in St. James's by following the butcher's men through the streets like a dog. I have seen this sheep steal mutton-chops and devour them raw. It preferred beef or mutton to grass. It enjoyed robust health, and was by no means ferocious.

It was merely a disgusting animal, with excessively perverted appetite; a perversion that supplies very suggestive material for human meditation.

My own experiments on myself, and the multitude of other experiments that I am daily witnessing among men of all occupations who have cast aside flesh-food after many years of mixed diet, prove incontestably that flesh-food is quite unnecessary; and also that men and women who emulate the aforesaid sheep to the mild extent of consuming daily about two ounces of animal tissue combined with six ounces of water, and dilute this with such weak vegetable food as the potato, are not measurably altered thereby so far as physical health is concerned.

On economical grounds, however, the difference is enormous. If all Englishmen were vegetarians, the whole aspect of the country would be changed. It would be a land of gardens and orchards, instead of gradually reverting to prairie grazing-ground as at present. The unemployed miserables of our great towns, the inhabitants of our union workhouses, and all our rogues and vagabonds, would find ample and suitable employment in agriculture. Every acre of land would require three or four times as much labor as at present, and feed five or six times as many people.

No sentimental exaggeration is demanded for the recommendation of such a reform as this.

I must apologize for this digression, as it has prevented me from closing this series with this paper, as I intended. In my next, which really will conclude, I shall describe some experiments I have recently made on the preparation of vegetable food.—Knowledge.



HE weightiest events of life sometimes turn upon small hinges; and we now come to the incident which caused M. Pasteur to quit a line of research the abandonment of which he still regrets. A German manufacturer of chemicals had noticed that the impure 