To Karl Höchberg   25 February 1879

Dear Sir

I have so many letters to answer that I must write briefly; but this does not signify as I have never attended specially to the subject of vegetarian diet.—¹ The sole evidence which in my opinion would be of real value, would be statistics & amount of work performed in countries where the inhabitants live on widely different diets. I have always been struck with the fact that the hardest workers, whom I ever saw, namely miners in Chile, lived exclusively on vegetable diet including much seeds of the Leguminosæ. On the other hand the Gauchos are very fine active men, who live almost exclusively on meat. Again there seems good evidence that in Tropical Africa there is an extraordinary craving, almost amounting to a necessity, for meat at intervals; & yet I suppose that they eat largely of the seeds of Leguminosæ, for the Arachis hypogæa is largely cultivated.²

Dear Sir | Yours faithfully | Ch. Darwin