Wherever the least degree of intoxication exists, a proportional debility is the consequence; but there is a golden rule by which the necessary and useful quantity of stimulus in fevers with debility may be ascertained.  When wine or beer are exhibited either alone or diluted with water, if the pulse becomes slower the stimulus is of a proper quantity; and should be repeated every two or three hours, or when the pulse again becomes quicker.

In the chronical debility brought on by drinking spirituous or fermented liquors, there is another golden rule by which I have successfully directed the quantity of spirit which they may safely lessen, for there is no other means by which they can recover their health.  It should be premised, that where the power of digestion in these patients is totally destroyed, there is not much reason to expect a return to healthful vigour.

I have directed several of these patients to omit one fourth part of the quantity of vinous spirit they have been lately accustomed to, and if in a fortnight their appetite increases, they are advised to omit another fourth part; but if they perceive that their digestion becomes impaired from the want of this quantity of spirituous potation, they are advised to continue as they are, and rather bear the ills they have, than risk the encounter of greater.  At the same time flesh-meat with or without spice is recommended, with Peruvian bark and steel in small quantities between their meals, and half a grain of opium or a grain, with five or eight grains of rhubarb at night.

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SECT.  XIII.

OF VEGETABLE ANIMATION.

I. 1. Vegetables are irritable; mimosa, dionaea muscipula.  Vegetable secretions. 2. Vegetable buds are inferior animals, are liable to greater or less irritability. II. Stamens and pistils of plants shew marks of sensibility. III. Vegetables possess some degree of volition. IV. Motions of plants are associated like those of animals. V. 1. Vegetable structure like that of animals, their anthers and stigmas are living creatures.  Male-flowers of Vallisneria. 2. Whether vegetables, possess ideas?  They have organs of sense as of touch and smell, and ideas of external things?

I. 1.  The fibres of the vegetable world, as well as those of the animal, are excitable into a variety of motion by irritations of external objects.  This appears particularly in the mimosa or sensitive plant, whose leaves contract on the slightest injury; the dionaea muscipula, which was lately brought over from the marshes of America, presents us with another curious instance of vegetable irritability; its leaves are armed with spines on their upper edge, and are spread on the ground around the stem; when an insect creeps on any of them in its passage to the flower or seed, the leaf shuts up like a steel rat-trap, and destroys its enemy.  See Botanic Garden, Part II. note on Silene.