< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu
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464

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

provement incidental to an active agricultural life have offered an attractive theme. The vegetable kingdom can satisfy all. "If any vegetarians be extravagant in milk and eggs, it is not from any craving of their stomachs, but from excess in zeal or ignorance in their cooks." (Newman, Frazer's Magazine, February, 1875.) Finally the Bible itself has been drawn upon to furnish lasting proof: "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." (Genesis, i., 29.)

The advocates of the vegetarian diet at the present day are no less ready to draw upon the diverse types of argument already discussed than were their predecessors of fifty years ago. In a recent volume, entitled 'The Living Temple' (1903), Dr. J. H. Kellogg, urging the use of non-meat diet, has presented the ethics of flesh-eating in the following light:

The basis for the ethical argument against flesh-eating is to be found in the fact that the lower animals are in common with man, sentient creatures. We have somehow become accustomed to think of our inferior brethren, the members of the lower orders of the animal kingdom, as things; . . . We are wrong in this; they are not things, but beings.. . . A horse or a cow can learn, remember, love, hate, mourn, rejoice, and suffer, as human beings do. Its sphere of life is certainly not so great as man's, but life is not the less real and not the less precious to it; and the fact that the quadruped has little is not a good and sufficient reason why the biped, who has much, should deprive his brother of the little that he hath. For the most part it must be said that the lower animals have adhered far more closely to the divine order established for them than has man. The divine order, as clearly shown by nature as well as by revelation, and by the traditions of the ancient world, and illustrated by the present practice of a great part of the human race makes the vegetable world the means of gathering and storing energy and making it into forms usable by the sentient beings that compose the animal world, the one gathering and storing that the other may expend. When animal eats vegetable, there is no pain, no sorrow, no sadness, no robbery, no deprivation of happiness. No eyes forever shut to the sunlight they were made to see, no ears closed to the sweet melodies they were made to hear, no simple delights denied to the beings that God made to enjoy life—the same life that He gave to his human children. (Pp. 184-185.)

On the other hand, we may recall Robert Louis Stevenson's apparent defense of cannibalism among some of the peoples inhabiting the South Sea Islands, He writes:

How shall we account for the universality of the practice over so vast an area, among people of such varying civilization, and, with whatever intermixture, of such different blood? What circumstance is common to them all, but that they lived on islands destitute, or very nearly so, of animal food? I can never find it in my appetite that man was meant to live on vegetables only. When our stores ran low among the islands, I grew too weary for the recurrent day when economy allowed us to open another tin of miserable mutton. And in at least one ocean language, a particular word denotes that a man is
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