Translator's note.

Advocates of vegetarianism may, of course, challenge this statement and show that all the testimony of anthropology is not in favor of the meat-eaters. It must also be admitted that diet is not the only essential factor in environment which influences the development of races. And there is no conclusive evidence to prove the absolute superiority of one diet over another. Neither have we any proofs that cannibalism ever was in general practice. It rather seems to have been confined to limited groups of people in especially ill-favored localities or to times of great scarcity of food. Hence we can neither refer to cannibalism as a typical stage in human history, nor are we obliged to accept the vegetarian hypothesis of a transition from a meat diet to a plant diet as a condition sine qua non of higher human development.