A curious fact was discovered by Professor Meyer, viz. that in all the vegetable-eating tribes the anterior tubercula quadrigemina are larger than the posterior, while in the flesh-eaters the posterior are uniformly larger than the anterior; and this, so far as this point has been investigated, is found to be the case without exception. In man the anterior, as is well known, are larger than the posterior.

§ II. VEGETARIANISM.

On the subject of the natural food of man we have two revelations, both from the same source, and in strict accordance with each other:-one, in the account given of man in the book of Genesis; the other, in the form and adaptation of the organs employed in preparing the food for digestion and nutrition.

When man was placed in Paradise, he was told what he might eat. "And God said, Behold, I have given you. every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth; and every tree in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed, to you it shall be for meat." No intimation was given that animal flesh should form any part of his food. It was not until after the flood that permission was given to eat flesh. We are assured that man was made upright, but that he had sought out many inventions. Some of these are by no means adapted to the preservation of health or the prolonging of life. The wickedness of man drew down the judgment of heaven in the form of a flood. "God saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." "The earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled

with violence." The bulk of the human family had arrived at the highest pitch of depravity and corruption, and it became necessary that they should be swept from the earth. Now it will be readily admitted that no community of men can become so savage, ferocious, and wicked, under the influence of a well-chosen vegetable diet, with water for the only drink, as under flesh-eating and the use of intoxicating drinks. If they made themselves vile and wicked by all the means which human ingenuity could invent, it is natural to infer that fermented liquors, narcotics, and flesh-eating, with all their exciting and maddening influences, were in general use. If the eating of flesh were in all respects as safe and healthful as vegetable food, and would multiply man's pleasures, no satisfactory reason can be offered why it was not given him in Paradise, while he was innocent, and while the Divine complacency towards him was perfect. The grant to eat flesh, after the flood, is as follows: Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh, with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat." Now why was this permission given, if it was not fitting that it should have been granted in Paradise? We know of no reason, except that assigned by our Saviour in reference to the Mosaic permission for men to put away their wives: it was "because of the hardness of their hearts."

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The Divine Lawgiver, in legislating for communities which have become perverse and have perseveringly resisted the strongest motives to obedience, adopts the course which under the circumstances makes the nearest approach to the end in view. So the children of Israel were prevented from eating animals that had died of

even as

themselves, which otherwise they would have done, by being allowed to sell them to "aliens." A benevolent and solicitous father, after having long tried in vain to reclaim a perverse son, at length gives him up to learn by experience what he refused to learn by precept and example, and says, "Well, take your own course; you may sometime find out that my way is the best." To Noah, the representative of the human family, God said, “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; · the green herb have I given you all things." As if he had said, “I gave you in Eden the green herb or the vegetable kingdom for your food. You were not satisfied with it, but insisted on eating flesh. Now eat flesh,- eat anything you choose, every moving thing that liveth. You may possibly find out some thousands of years hence that my way, is the best to secure health, to prolong life, and to preserve the moral sense. But you shall not eat it with the blood. This must be got out of it by bleeding the animal, and by cooking, which modifies the bad effects of flesh."

From this condition being annexed to the grant of flesheating, it can hardly be doubted that, before the flood, the habit of eating flesh with the blood in it, and even taking it raw, had prevailed. In modern times, an African tribe, who eat flesh raw and full of blood, being just cut from the living animal, are represented as ferocious and cruel. After the flood the life of man was shortened, not suddenly as by miracle, but gradually, as if under physical influences that operated slowly from generation to generation through a long period of time. What influences would be more likely to abridge the period of life than flesh-eating with strong drink and narcotics? Diet has a stronger influence upon health and life than climate. In both very hot and very cold climates we find striking

examples of longevity, especially among those whose diet is simple and unstimulating. It occupied several centuries to reduce the life of man to a hundred years. The great age of eight hundred years and upwards belonged to those who were in a direct line from Adam, through his son Seth, to Noah; and as those who observed the primitive institutions were called the sons of God, in distinction from the children of Cain, called the sons of men, it is not unreasonable to suppose that while the masses of mankind were shortening their days by every kind of iniquity and excess, those in the direct line lived in obedience to God's commands, as did Enoch and Noah. As an objection to the vegetarian system, it has been urged that our Saviour wrought a miracle to supply fish as well as bread; and that he himself ate fish with his disciples after the resurrection. This is freely admitted. All this is consistent with the declaration made before he left our world: “I have yet many things to say to you, but ye cannot bear them now." While on earth he conformed in his living to the temperate usages of society at that period. The time had not come for all the improvements which should be introduced by the operation of the principles he had laid down. Wine-drinking and flesh-eating were to remain for future developments. The benevolent Creator, having stamped upon the organization of man a reference to his most natural food in characters unmistakable and ineffaceable, having given him specific directions in Paradise, and having afterwards legislated upon it, allowing him, on account of his perverseness, to eat what was not the best suited to his health, saw fit to leave the remedy to grow out of the results of observation and experience, aided by science and those gospel principles which call for an elevated standard of Christian piety and self-denial.

CHAPTER IX.

DISEASES OF THE TEETH AND OF WILD ANIMALS.

§ I. DISEASED TEETH.

HUMAN teeth are subject to no inconsiderable variety of disease, as neuralgia, inflammation of the periosteum of the root, inflammation and abscess in the pulp, or in the bony substance of the body or root, or in the wall of the socket; necrosis of the root, caries or rot in the bony tissue of the body; deposit of tartar upon the necks of the teeth, causing an absorption of the gum or socket, until the teeth become loose and fall out of the jaw.

The suggestion cannot for a moment be entertained, that the benevolent Author of our being could have sent out from his creative hand man, his crowning work in our world, with a set of teeth so imperfectly organized as to be far less durable than those of the beasts of the forest. A diseased tooth is one of the rarest things to be found, if found at all, in the skull of a wild animal. I have examined the skeletons of some hundreds of wild animals, without observing an unquestionable specimen of caries in the teeth. In the spring of 1857, I addressed a note to Dr. Leidy, Professor of Anatomy in the University of Pennsylvania, whose acquirements in comparative anatomy are very extensive, asking if he had seen caries of the teeth in animals which died in the state of nature.