AMERICAN PREFACE.
The great importance of, and interest in, the Vegetarian question, involving as it does the relations of food to health, and, indeed, the theory of the progress, improvement, and destiny of the human race, render a text book of facts and principles not only desirable but indispensable.
The sources from whence the arguments for or against an exclusively vegetable diet are usually and necessarily derived, are natural history, physiology, experience, and revelation; hence the student has an ample range in the prosecution of his researches; whilst the author who undertakes to collate judiciously the essential problems in all their departments of knowledge, and present intelligibly their vast variety of statistical data, requires a mind of no ordinary discernment and discrimination.
But the author of "Fruits and Farinacea" has executed such a task, and in a most admirable manner, as the present work—which I cannot too strongly commend to the American people, and to all truth-seekers everywhere—abundantly testifies. As a compendium of the evidences and reasonings on the whole subject of the philosophy of diet, it is as full and complete as can well be compressed within the narrow compass of a small book.
The explanatory notes and physiological illustrations which I have added, are intended mainly to elucidate such of the more difficult and most disputed propositions as the general reader may not have time or opportunity to explore by the ordinary method of scientific investigation.
Hydropathic and Hygienic Institute.
New York, 1854.
