The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-eating is an 1883 book by Howard Williams, on the history of vegetarianism. The book was influential on the development of the Victorian vegetarian movement. The book tells the history of vegetarianism since the writings of the first Pythagorean philosophers of the Ancient World until the author's time. Among the authors mentioned in the book are: Ovid, Plutarch, Porphyry, Luigi Cornaro, Michel de Montaigne, John Ray, Voltaire, Alexander Pope, Percy Shelley, Alphonse de Lamartine, Joseph Ritson, and Gustav Struve. Not all authors mentioned in the book were vegetarians (Thomas More, for example, was probably not a vegetarian), but they all had critical views of meat-eating.
