fever, says:  “Alcoholic stimulants are, by no means, always required, and their indiscriminate use may do a great deal of harm.”  In Asiatic cholera, brandy was formerly administered freely to patients when in the stage of collapse.  The effect was injurious, instead of beneficial.  “Again and again,” says Prof.  G. Johnson, “have I seen a patient grow colder, and his pulse diminish in volume and power, after a dose of brandy, and, apparently, as a direct result of the brandy.”  And Dr. Pidduck, of London, who used common salt in cholera treatment, says:  “Of eighty-six cases in the stage of collapse, sixteen only proved fatal, and scarcely one would have died, if I had been able to prevent them from taking brandy and laudanum.”  Dr. Collenette, of Guernsey, says:  “For more than thirty years I have abandoned the use of all kinds of alcoholic drinks in my practice, and with such good results, that, were I sick, nothing would induce me to have resource to them—­they are but noxious depressants.”

As a non-professional writer, we cannot go beyond the medical testimony which has been educed, and we now leave it with the reader.  We could add many pages to this testimony, but such cumulative evidence would add but little to its force with the reader.  If he is not yet convinced that alcohol has no food value, and that, as a medicine, its range is exceedingly limited, and always of doubtful administration, nothing further that we might be able to cite or say could have any influence with him.

CHAPTER VI.

THE GROWTH AND POWER OF APPETITE.

One fact attendant on habitual drinking stands out so prominently that none can call it in question.  It is that of the steady growth of appetite.  There are exceptions, as in the action of nearly every rule; but the almost invariable result of the habit we have mentioned, is, as we have said, a steady growth of appetite for the stimulant imbibed.  That this is in consequence of certain morbid changes in the physical condition produced by the alcohol itself, will hardly be questioned by any one who has made himself acquainted with the various functional and organic derangements which invariably follow the continued introduction of this substance into the body.

But it is to the fact itself, not to its cause, that we now wish to direct the reader’s attention.  The man who is satisfied at first with a single glass of wine at dinner, finds, after awhile, that appetite asks for a little more; and, in time, a second glass is conceded.  The increase of desire may be very slow, but it goes on surely until, in the end, a whole bottle will scarcely suffice, with far too many, to meet its imperious demands.  It is the same in regard to the use of every other form of alcoholic drink.