Alcohol in the blood, as alcohol outside it, is an antiseptic agent of singular power. In states of bloodpoisoning and fever it lessens the tendency of the blood itself to break up, and of the living particles, the cells in it, to disintegrate; it promotes the consolidation of the tissues of the body, when these are prompted by some fermenting disturbance, as in fever, to swell up and incorporate more water than they require. It, further, in fever retards that very consumption of tissue which constitutes the pyretic or febrile state, arresting, as we have shown, all chemical interchanges between the blood and the tissues, by its own more vigorous action as an oxidising agent.

Magnus Huss, in his work on Alcoholism, classifies individual temperaments according to their several proclivities to exceed in drinking, and to suffer from the action of alcohol. First, because most mischievously affected, he places the sanguine nature; second, the bilious; third, the lymphatic; and last of all, the

nervous.

It is well known that the inhabitants of cold and damp northern climates are, in respect of consuming liquor, the chief sinners; the Italian and Spaniard, inhabitants of hot and sunny climes, and living beneath blue skies, being broadly and generally speaking sober people. Their energies are perhaps too active to need further stimulation.

Our own experience has taught us that the temperament which in this country appears most prejudicially affected by alcohol is the sanguine. Plethoric persons, although strong-headed, and able to carry, as is said, unusual quantities of spirit without being intoxicated, exhibit small power of self-control in drinking, and suffer accordingly.

Those again who inherit an unstable mental equilibrium, irritable, excitable persons, and epileptics, should abstain from alcohol as rigorously as from very poison. Contrariwise, the lymphatic, the over-large, pale, apathetic personages find good wine and beer, not only their best medicine, but a useful adjunct to their dietaries.

There are writers who attribute all the ill effects of alcohol to the impurity of the liquors drunk, the amount of fusel oil, œnanthic ether, volatile oils, and acids in them. These people remind us of the bon vivants who attribute their headaches and parched tongues to the soup, the fish, or the sweets.

That certain adulterations and impurities, which provoke thirst, and so excess in drinking, are wickedly pernicious, we are quite ready to concede; but that fusel oil is the principal deleterious agent in spirits, or that the brain suffers especially from it, and not from the alcohol, we see no reason for believing.

But into the long category of more or less poisonous

alcoholic mixtures we have no intention to enter.

There

are tinctures of certain herbs, as absinthe, and liqueurs, as vermouth, which it is likely enough exert some special deliriant effects upon the brain, acting in this particular like Indian hemp, henbane, stramonium, belladonna, camphor.

Some wines inebriate more rapidly than others; others deteriorate the digestion especially. Light sparkling wines make people cheerful and talkative, heavy wines and beers render them morose and sleepy; but these are general facts which we have not time or right to discuss more minutely under the action of alcohol.

IX.

MUSCULAR MOTION AS EXEMPLIFIED IN THE

HUMAN BODY.

THERE are two things in which most men believe-force and matter; but the one is so intimately blended with the other that, apart, we can hardly, if at all, recognise them. Now, of late years, since the sciences called the natural sciences have been more and more studied, men have set themselves to work to investigate what is called force, and have found that what were formerly held to be separate and distinct forces [or, as people then preferred calling them, imponderable bodies, that is to say, substances which could not be weighed, and which had none of the other ordinary properties of matter], were in reality identical, and that one force passed into another kind of force, insensibly it might be, but not the less surely on that account.

To take an example: formerly men held electricity, magnetism, chemical force, heat, light, and motion to be things totally different and distinct. Now-a-days most men look upon these as one and the same, modified variously but still identical; so that either can take the

place of the other. As the simplest of these, motion has been accepted as a kind of starting-point, and hence all the various forces we have mentioned above, as well as certain others we might name, are held to be modes of motion. Everybody has heard of the plan adopted by some savage races to kindle their fires, when live embers are not to be had, and where lucifer matches are unknown. They rub together two pieces of dry wood until one or the other takes fire, and thus effect their purpose. Now, what have we here? We shall not yet speak of the changes within the body which movement implies, but, starting with the motion given to the two pieces of wood, we see how motion gives rise to heat, how heat ends in flame—that is, light-giving chemical changeand so on; for with chemical change begins a new series. Thus, when two metals of opposite characters are acted upon by compound substances, like oil of vitriol, or aqua fortis, or blue vitriol, chemical change goes on and electricity shows itself, as in the ordinary galvanic batteries, which are now familiarised to the public at the different telegraph stations. Electricity, in its turn, acting on a bar of soft iron, makes it a temporary magnet, which has the same powers for the time being as a loadstone. Electricity may also easily be converted into light and heat, as in the electric light which is now used as a beacon to sailors at Dungeness and other