12 THE MEAT FETISH.
teen years old, and that it made them sick. All of which goes to show that meat is not man's natural food. The structure of his body confirms this belief. He has the long intestines of the graminivorous animals, and not the short intestines of the carnivora. His jaws are hung so that they can grind upon each other, like those of the horse, cow, and camel, and are not fixed vertically like the dog's. He has no carnivorous teeth, those to which that name is often given—the eye-teeth—being much more pronounced in the non-carnivorous anthropoid ape. Richard Owen, the great anatomist and natural historian, said long ago that "the anthropoids and all the quadrumana derive their alimentation from fruits, grains, and other succulent vegetal substances, and the strict analogy between the structure of these animals and that of man clearly demonstrates his frugivorous nature," and this truth is more firmty established to-day than it was when he wrote. It is not natural to eat meat, and we cook it and season it for the express purpose of disguising it. It is not possible to decide positively how man came to adopt an unnatural food, but it is the opinion of the best scientific writers that he may have felt himself forced to it during the Glacial Period, and the disappearance beneath snow and ice of other sources of food-supply. It is unnatural to bury the dead in our stomachs. A vegetarian friend of mine received a present of a brace of grouse one August from an ill-informed acquaintance. In his letter of thanks he advised the donor that he had interred them decorously in his back-yard, and this course seems to me the more natural.
Against this unclean, unwholesome, unnatural diet of meat let us set the vegetable kingdom. If the animal world is unclean and polluting, so is the vegetable world clean and cleansing. What are the excreta of tree and plant? What but the perfume of the flower and the aroma of the forest? And animal filth only makes them flourish the more and smell the sweeter.
