other, the fatal cases are counted by thousands and tens of thousands.

"What!" say the alcoholists, "will you stop us from shaving, because a man now and then cuts his throat?" No. But if it so happen that one out of every four or five men who imitate your example is led thereby to cut his throat some maimed and mutilated for life, some suicides then surely common humanity should persuade you to throw away the razor in disgust, and identify yourself with the beard movement.

Let us take one other view of the "Food" question, before leaving it.

A tree is known by its fruits. Food is estimated by its results. A man or animal, subsisting on convenient food, will prosper on it, more or less. How fares it with the man that lives on alcohol? There are some alas! far too many-who, with much truth, may be said almost to do so. Like Falstaff, they have but a morsel of bread to their much sack. Nay, they pride themselves on being "small eaters;" honestly adding, however, that they "take a good deal of drink;" and then perhaps setting up a plea for this latter questionable virtue being in their case somewhat of a necessity. Some such there are, who live thus by choice; others are driven to it, in a sense, by reason of insufficient food-"their poverty, and not their will, consenting" to this sad substitute. The case of the latter is pitiable, and not without excuse; but in all the result is the

same.

It is as follows, as has been in part stated already, when considering the signs of general poisoning (p. 35)..

Be he beer-drinker, wine-drinker, or dra-drinker, who lives thus snipe-like by suction, the evidence of the feeding power of his diet stands thus. Besides the diseases of the various organs, already spoken of, manifesting themselves by their ordinary signs, the process of general nutrition is obviously out of joint. The skin is discolored and diseased, and hangs loose and flabby on the parts beneath. These are soft and doughy; and there is an excess of water in the cellular tissue, giving a dropsical appearance. Where there should be muscular firmness and rotundity, there is thinness and misery of limb; where fineness and sharpness of outline, there is heavy and misshapen pulp. The eye is glassy and unspeculative; the tongue is foul, and not so glib as was its wont; the breath is fetid, and noisome eructations with filthiness of spit are ever and anon emerging. The hands are hot and tremulous; the limbs, too, shake, and feebly totter as they go. The clothes hang loose upon the skeleton, as this daily becomes more and more apparent; the cheekbones stare, the cheeks themselves fall in; and the merest child may tell that the whole man, mental and corporeal, is starving. "Come away!" said a late Lord of Session, to a lean, tall, sallow, withered Writer to the Signet, who entered the Parliament House eating a dry split haddock, or speldron-"Come away, Mr. -! I am glad to see you looking so like your meat." This was a mere joke on the part of the learned lord. But in the case of the man we speak of, such a phrase would be full of sad truth. He does indeed look like his "meat"-unsubstantial, unstable, unwholesc me; his life " even as a vapor vanishing away."

Or if he be young, and mainly live (?) 01. malt, there may be an apparent nutrition and growth. He may grow fat; but the fat is not that which in an ox a flesher would call "prime." It is soft, thin, and ill-colored. Ill placed it is too; collecting where no fat should be; putting the outer man all out of drawing, and squeezing some of the internal organs most inconveniently; his voice is changed, his breath is short and wheezing, and his heart is laboring. Rapidly this fat, both out and in, has accumulated, like snow by the wayside; and as rapidly it may thaw and drip away, leaving as a residuc the most gaunt and grisly form of humanity.

There are fat and lean kine, then, produced on this pasturage; but they are all "ill-favored." Sometimes there is, as it were, a crossing of the breed, and the two conditions are somewhat mixed up-in every case, however, expressing the unnatural and diseased, and usually betokening a rapid onset of premature old age, as has been well expressed by the great dramatist, "a marvellous observer of men and manners." "Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth that are written down old, with all the characters of age? Have you not a moist eye, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you bloated with antiquity? and wil you yet call yourself young? Fie, fie, fie, Sir John." In many a case there is another fatness. unseen, but all the more dangerous. The alcohol preventing the burning off of the fat taken as food, as well as of that which circulates in the blood, as part of the waste mate.

rial of the frame, causes accumulation of this somewhere as we have seen (page 35), and experience shows that it is prone not only to be put down on tissue, but to be put down in and to take the place of tissue. The heart, for example, is liable not only to be loaded with fat, but to be in part converted into fat; and the whole arterial tissue is exposed to the same degeneracy. The liver, and kidneys, too, are not exempt. And so the man becomes constitutionally undermined, ere ever he be aware; not only rendered incurably diseased, but liable to sudden death from very slight cause. The insurance offices know this well; and either reject the habitual soaker, summarily, or exact such an additional premium as virtually amounts to refusal of the policy.

Moreover, the fatty degeneracy of the structure may be so extensive, and the soaking of the entire frame in unchanged alcohol so thorough, as to render the man dangerously prone to a most lamentable consummation, from a common outward cause - his alcohol proving an "aptitude for combustion" in a way he little dreamt of. Falling asleep near a fire or candle, a spark lights upon him; and having become as it were a compound of an oil or spirit lamp-with a dash of phosphorus to boot (page 19)—he burns with a strange burning: producing little flame or heat, but steadily consuming away, in horrid stench, leaving but a small residue of dark, offensive, unctuous dross to mark the place where he lay.*

*Examples of this fearful ending are by no means very rare. The term of "spontaneous combustion" is a misnomer, only so far as im plying that the incremation is of spontaneous origin. Authentic

Sometimes these serious evils are long protracted, even in hard and habitual drinkers, who for a time may actually seem of specially robust health. But all is deceitful. Take the stout, burly, red-faced, brewers' drayman, for example-who is daily consuming his horns of ale or porter, with his modicum of spirits to make them "light" and let any disease or accident befall him. This will at once shiver the outward crust of health and strength to atoms. The man can neither bear disease, nor the remedies for disease; the surgeon and physician stand all but helpless at the bed of such a patient; and a scratch or common ail, by which a temperate or abstinent man would not be held for a day, may fatally sweep away this other within a few days, or even hours. What would prove but a simple healthy inflammation in the temperate, degenerates in the intemperate into an unhealthy kind, prone to pass into gangrene. Four cases of mortification of the lungs are narrated by Dr. Stokes and all in drunkards.

Such are some of the doings of alcohol in the way of nourishing. Looking to the results, we may well say, If this be food, it is manifestly of a very perverse kindmost unwholesome. And those who vend it might, not unreasonably, be dealt with by the civic and legal authorities, as nefariously trading in "diseased meat"-fined and interdicted, with confiscation of all the noxious stuff found on the premises.

cases will be found detailed by Dr. Charles Wilson, in his "Pathology of Drunkenness, page 92, et seq.