generally allowed that combustion is the result of the violent action of bodies and gases upon each other. The heat of our bodies may, in a great degree, be the effect of circulation. When the circulation is stopped, the limb is cold: the chill of death is suspended action or circulation. By circulating the blood through our feet or hands with increased activity we warm them. Increased exertion makes us perspire; increases, therefore, the absorption of our frame, and consequently produces thirst.

Only think, then, of the madness of giving a burning stimulating liquor to a laboring man, or indeed to any one, to quench his thirst! You pour into his frame a fiery liquid to quench his thirst! You increase the excitement, the circulation, the absorption, the perspiration, and consequent exhaustion of the body; and do this, you say, to quench thirst!! Why not, in the plenitude of such wisdom, pour oil upon your fire when you wish to extinguish it? or naphtha, turpentine, and pitch, upon the child whose clothes have just ignited? The latter, remember, would be just as prudent as the former. The cases are perfectly parallel: in the one there is too much fire, and to extinguish it you add more! and in the other there is too much warmth and exhaustion, and to diminish it you administer a liquid stimulating fire! In hot climates the mortality among our troops and officers has been attributed to ardent spirits, and correctly so. The heat of the country is exhausting; the fatigues of military duty are exhausting; and, if to this you add an exhausting, stimulating liquid poison, you increase the labor of the system beyond what it can bear, and the man dies before his time. It was not the climate that killed him, man is made to live in all climates; it was not labor that killed him, labor is conducive to health; it was ardent spirit that exhausted and slew him. You gave him rations of rum, and the liquid fire kindled fevers and inflammations; or, by unnatural absorption, consumed the resources of his body and brought on emaciation, collapse, and death. The heat and labors of the hay-field, of the smithy, the foundry, or the sugar-house, are exhausting and tend to thirst; but who, to prevent this, or to cure it, would add to heat, and thirst, and fatigue, the excitement and exhaustion of a burning stimulating liquor?

Every man who drinks beer, wine, or spirits, knows that they increase heat and thirst. Often does the tippler call for water to quench the burning heat and thirst that strong drink has kindled. On the other hand, our harvest men, our smiths, sugar-bakers, sawyers, carpenters, and others who have adopted total abstinence, complain less of thirst and fatigue than formerly. These men having, in time past, felt the exhaustion of drinking, and having now, in their own experience, an increase of vigor, possess a proof which baffles contradiction, that total abstinence has the sanction of nature. Those, too, who labor in damps, as bricklayers, brickmakers, and others, find that they are now less liable to cold. Intoxicating drinks used to spread over their frame an unnatural heat, and this was followed by an unnatural degree of cold, which, connected with the chilling damps of their labor, brought on chills, rheumatism, and various other diseases which, by total abstinence, they now entirely escape.

Experience shows that neither in warm temperatures nor in cold ones, are strong drinks necessary. Captain Ross, in the frozen regions, found that his men enjoyed better health and suffered less from frost without these liquors than with them. The writer has traveled in the midst of frost and snow, and drunk brandy and water until he was himself nearly frozen; he has traveled in the same kind of weather, and drunk nothing but water, and been comfortably warm. The brandy increased circulation and produced heat for a short time; but then Dr. Farre's law of the forcing system was regularly observed; after every glass of spirits," the circulation fell off in a greater degree than it was forced," and much more intense cold was felt as the consequence. Mr. Hoskins, in his late visit to the Pyramids, found, by his own experience, and that of others, that the water of the Nile, was, in that hot country, the most refreshing and invigorating beverAnd he states that spirit drinkers very soon became incapable of enduring the climate. This is perfectly natural. If the absorption is great, and the perspiration profuse, nothing can better supply this waste than the simplest beverage; and that beverage is water. To drink alcoholic drinks at such a time would be to increase the evil which drinking is intended to re

age.

move.

Nothing can be more fallacious than the opinions that generally prevail respecting drinking. We are probably become the most drinking people upon the face of the earth, and thus are continually overloading our system with some fluid or other, and by this means producing disease. Many persons drink from habit, and not from thirst. From this cause, some who have become tetotalers have, on giving up their beer and wine, begun to drench themselves with water, or tea and coffee, and then have said that total abstinence did not agree with them. But why thus overload the system with fluids which nature never demanded by the gentle whisper of thirst? Abernethy has recommended us not to drink until three hours after dinner. Dr. Beaumont found that the stomach cannot digest food except at a hundred degrees of temperature. He found also that a gill of cold water lowered the heat of St. Martin's stomach twenty degrees, and consequently delayed digestion until its accustomed heat was recovered. The writer has found all his sensations of indigestion return from foolishly drinking cold water at his meals, and which was not demanded by thirst. And why be always drinking? There is a great deal of moisture in all we eat. Animal food is perhaps full one-half water. Bread contains in it

water, for we do not like it when it is entirely dry. Potatoes are quite three-fourths water, and other vegetables are charged with a great or even greater amount.

Many complaints are no doubt the consequence of diluting the blood with so much liquid, and especially so when these drinks are charged with spirit. If drink is wanting, the veins will convey the intelligence to the stomach, and the stomach to the brain, and we shall feel thirsty; but if not thirsty, why keep loading our bodies with liquor? The gastric juice, as Dr. Beaumont discovered, is unfitted for its work by being diluted with even the simplest liquid, much more, then, must it be injured when that liquid is charged with poison. The animals are in many When left to themselves they all eat and drink like philosophers. God sends the sluggard to the ant, the inconsiderate to the crane and the swallow, and he rebuked Balaam by an ass. We might learn from the same source a few useful lessons in dietetics, and especially in drinking.

respects wiser than we are.

They drink when they are thirsty, and would we go and do likewise, we might save ourselves many a pain. Nature always carries in her hand a rod, and if we will drink what is not wanted, she will most certainly make us smart for our folly.

Alcoholic drinks, then, are not necessary to quench our thirst, and indeed rather increase than diminish it, and unnecessary potations of even the simplest liquids rather injure than benefit our health and vigor.

3. These drinks are not needed as medicines. In the quotation already given from Mr. Higginbotham, it was stated that if alcohol was instantly abolished “as a medicine it would not be missed." A surgeon of considerable practice, and who is a great enemy to total abstinence, speaking the other day of the value of spirits as a medicine, I asked him" If there was no other medicine that would supply its place." Yes," he replied, "ammonia would do as well." "Then," said I, "why do you use spirits ?" Merely," he answered, "because they are always at hand." Such is the testimony of an enemy.

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Dr. Evans, at a temperance meeting, at Gloucester, declared, "That there was no medicine which so soon rendered a disease intractable as spirits, and none required to be administered with so much care." I once knew a healthy woman seized with English cholera ; a physician attended her, successfully treated the disease, and in a few days pronounced her out of danger. He had been successful in curing numbers of the same malady, and therefore knew all the symptoms of convalescence. The next day when he called he found her dying. "What have you given this woman?" "Nothing, sir," responded the nurse. "You may," said he, "refuse to tell me what you have given her, but something has been administered." "Only a little home-made wine,” was then the answer. The woman, the mother of a young family, died the next day the physician, who was a very feeling man, told me he could not refrain from tears, and he said to the nurse, "Remember," exclaimed he, "had you applied a pistol to that woman's head, and blown out her brains, you would not more effectually have deprived her of life."

In this case the alcohol brought on inflammation of the bowels, which baffled the power of medicine to subdue, and

thus the church was deprived of a member, and a young family of a mother. Hundreds of thousands of others have been swept from the world by the same cause. If there is the least inflammation in the body, alcohol aggravates it; if there is the least wound, this vile spirit seeks it and poisons it. By drinking spirits for a cold, the lungs, already tender, are often poisoned and ulcerated beyond recovery; and hence the frequency of consumption in our country. All disease may be said to be remedial in its design. In most instances it arises from an effort of nature to dismiss from the system something that is injurious, and it is only when it has gone too far for the rest of the fabric to render assistance, or is aggravated by our own folly or that of others, that it becomes fatal. We may be told, that if alcohol is a poison, poisons are used in medicine. But, it may be replied, that a healthy man does not want medicine, and further, that in cases of sickness, poison is generally administered to produce disease rather than to cure it. There is in the system an affection which the physician cannot reach, and knowing that by producing disease in some other part, he can perhaps draw it to that part, he administers a poison or applies a blister. That is, he produces a disease which he can cure, in order to attract or dislodge one which otherwise he cannot cure. But it would be just as reasonable for a healthy man to be always applying to his body a blister, as for him to be daily drinking a spirit which he says is medicine, and which will worse than blister his stomach and the pyloric valve.

If it be objected that persons in sickness often feel almost instantaneous relief from spirits, we reply, that it is granted by all that spirits are exciting; that they go to the head and animate the mind, but at the very time that they excite and divert the feelings, they feed the disease. They may go to the head and nerves, and stimulate them, and at the same moment flee to the seat of the malady, and often render it incurable. "Art thou in health, my brother?" said the insidious Joab, and at the same moment stabbed his victim in the fifth rib. Besides, in most cases, rest is necessary for the suffering patient; why then produce unnatural degree of exhaustion and absorption? If you would not send him to his labor, why stimulate every nerve and organ in his body?