contrary, the diagnosis is wrong, the agent will do harm and no good. In other words, if there be no medical necessity for alcoholic drinks, their use even in small quantity must fail to benefit, and must injure more or less. On the one hand, if there be a necessity for alcoholics, don't be afraid to give them, for the system will bear them well so long as that necessity exists; on the other hand, if there be no such necessity, be afraid to give them, even in small quantity, for the system cannot then receive them with impunity. Such is the double play of the law of tolerance. No doubt, you find men apparently in good health who take daily so many glasses of wine, or their equivalent in spirits or malt liquors, and who nevertheless seem none the worse. But to this the answer is twofold: First, the absence of evil in effect may be only a "seeming." There may be a gradual and insidious evil at work, though unobserved much as the malaria does not at the first seem hurtful, yet is gradually accumulating its power within till it burst out in the formidable fever.* Second, the goodness of health may be but a "seeming." May not the unnecessary use of alcoholics have engendered a diseased state of the system, which requires a continuance of the alcoholics to counteract it? Much as in the case of the smoker of tobacco or opium:-in perfect health, the drug would sicken or stupify him; but being

The famous Alexis St. Martin's stomach, it will be remembered, had a window; and, looking through that, one could often note Inflaming patches on the mucous coat, the result of alcoholic indulgence, though Alexis felt no headache, thirst, fever, or other inconvenience.

in a diseased state-in consequence of the drug's pre vious consumption when not required-the smoking scems rather beneficial than otherwise. In other words, and in plainer language, the man apparently in health who takes alcoholics habitually with seeming impunity nay, with a feeling of benefit, as well as of relish — is probably in the same state, though of a minor degree, as the confirmed tippler or drunkard, who has depressed and shaken his nervous system by excessive indulgence in alcoholics, and who needs must have his alcoholics again to raise his nervous system out of such depression -temporary and deceitful though such raising be. The difference between the two men is in degree only, not in kind. In both there is a depression produced and a stimulus given, and the agent of depression and of stimulation is one and the same.-3. Remember in suitable cases the medicinal mode of administration. The alcohol is not given in such dose as to produce its second or sedative effect-that is truly poisonous. Its first or stimulant action is wanted; and, to secure that, the doses must be small; their repetition being in every case regulated by the effect.-4. Supposing the diagnosis and administration right, remember there is a time to cease from its use. This is most important, yet too often overlooked. Suppose a medical man to order blue-pill once or twice a day, and, overlooking its effects, to forget to stop it at the proper time. Perhaps the first intimation of his error would be the discovery of intense salivation, with loose teeth, swollen gums, and ulcerated tongue, in his unfortunate patient-his constitution mayhap hurt irretrievably. Or he orders lead, and

forgets that he has done so, till the man is struck with a colic or a palsy. Such mistakes are very rarely made -just because their detection were easy. But a precisely similar mistake is far from rare. Alcoholics are ordered, rightly or wrongly; the effects are not watched; their use is not stopped at the proper time; and the first intimation of the blunder may be the painful discovery that the man has become a drunkard. I would not be uncharitable to my professional brethren; but I would entreat them to consider this matter well-satisfied as I am that many a case of hopeless intemperance, especially among the better classes, owes its origin to ill-regulated medical administration.

Or the evil may fall short of this; and, in illustration, take another case. Suppose a medical man to order opium, to relieve pain or procure sleep, in needful and urgent circumstances; and that he neglects either to regulate its dose, or to order its discontinuance when the necessity for its use has ceased. The convalescent, improperly left to himself, finds, first, that he must increase the dose to attain the ordinary effect; and, secondly, that after a time he can ill do without it. Ere ever he is aware, he becomes an opium-eater-the victim of an infirmity most difficult of cure. And so with the alcohol. Left without due control, the dose is increased, and the habit becomes confirmed; the system refuses to part willingly with its use; and the man, besides being brought into a morbid state of bodily frame, is in extreme moral danger of intemperance.

ALCOHOL AS FOOD.

Here is the fundamental and fatal error: men esteeming that to be food, and using it as such, which is really not food, but physic.

Food, properly so called, is that which enters the stomach, and is thence absorbed into the general circulation, with the double object of nourishing the body and maintaining its due temperature. Such food meets with a solvent in the natural secretions of the stomach, and of other organs connected with the chyle-making apparatus - such as the salivary glands, the liver, the pancreas; and, besides, a solvent is needful also from without-holding the food in solution at the time of being taken, or swallowed along with it, or after it, in sips or draughts. Now, can alcohol be duly entered here as food, or solvent for food? Not as the latter, certainly. It refuses to act along with the gastric juice. "It is a remarkable fact," says Dr. Dundas Thomson, "that alcohol, when added to the digestive fluid, produces a white precipitate, so that the fluid is no longer capable of digesting animal or vegetable matter." "The use of alcoholic stimulants," say Todd and Bowman, "retards digestion by coagulating the pepsin (an essential element of the gastric juice), and thereby interfering with its action. Were it not that wine and spirits are rapidly absorbed, the introduction of these into the stomach in any quantity would be a complete bar to the digestion of the food, as the pepsin would be precipitated from solution as quickly as it was formed by the stomach."

In the laboratory of the pharmaceutist, alcohol is very valuable as a solvent; it holds many things in admirable solution, and many a good tincture it makes. But in the living stomach of man-which ought to be no drugshop-alcohol tends to harden and coagulate, rather than to soften and dissolve. "It is through the medium of the water contained in the animal body," says Carpenter, "that all its vital functions are carried on. No other liquid than water can act as a solvent for the various articles of food which are taken into the stomach." Water dissolves them there; water carries them into the blood, and through the frame; and water helps to work them off again when useless. Indeed, water seems to have a very remarkable power in depuration of the system from the noxious presence of effete material more especially when taken beyond the limits of what mere slaking of thirst requires. And on this waterpower, no doubt, much of the success of "the watercure" depends.

But if alcohol be no solvent of food, is it food itself? Let us see. Can it nourish or repair the waste of tissue? Not at all. It contains no sufficient chemical constitution for that end; and besides, as we have seen, it is conveyed unchanged into the blood, and so circulates there until either disposed of by combustion in the lungs, or removed (more or less modified then) by the organs of excretion.

Does it help to maintain due temperature? It is only too ready to do so. It is very forward to be burnt in the lungs. But is its action there desirable? The mixed ordinary food of man (as beef, bread, and vege