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and diets of the long lived persons and found out the great law existing between the purity and simplicity of the former and the long life of the latter. He then wrote a “luminous and the eloquent essay” on Defence of Vegetable Regimen expounding the principles that un- derlie the perpetuation of life, and thus gave a new impetus to the investigation of laws governing the length of human life. After the time of Newton, the question of clean food and its intimate relation to a healthy long life, touched the finer feelings of so great an angelic soul as the poet Shelley and so much excited his compassion for human and animal life that he promptly wrote a thoughtful, sound and brilliant essay entitled. "A Vindication of Natural Diet" and dissemi- nated his precious ideas all over the foreign countries.
From the time of Shelly this important subject began to engage the attention of many great scientists such as Louis Kuhne, Dr. A. Haig, Prof. Metchnikoff, Prof. Loeb, Dr. Albert Matthews, and Dr. J. H. Kellogg and of such great thinkers and philosophers as Prentice Mulford, Helen Wilmans, Harry Gaze and others. Dr. Haig's book on “Uric Acid” and Dr. Kellogg's “The New Dietetics” are teally epoch-making works in as much as they bring to clear light the hitherto hidden fact relating to food and life. The number of learned people who are greatly benefited by the teachings of these eminent authorities is daily increasing by tens and hundreds of thousands in foreign countries, while here in Southern India those who know even the names of these savants are extremely rare.
When this vital knowledge is in such a deplorable condition even among the English-educated people of this country, is it to be wondered at for its being mjch more so among others who are al- most illiterate and who only speak Tamil but know not either to read or write any thing in it? That the increasing number of the English- educated persons should, after completing their university course, go
