fluence on the nerves, of Burgundy. In ordinarily good hock or Rhenish wine, this is not perceptible.

Some of the lighter wines of this class, Moselle for example, are artificially flavoured, and are an agreeable beverage in the summer. But upon the whole, these light Rhenish wines, and the corresponding French wines, are greatly inferior to good table-beer, and are much less wholesome: they are commonly drank because they are wine, by those with whom stronger wines disagree.

One remark is always introduced when the effects of wine upon the system are noticed. It is justly held that mixing wines renders them doubly noxious.

It deserves remark, perhaps, that bad wine seems to produce intoxication sooner than good wine, even when weaker than the good wine. This is owing to its effect on the stomach. Wine may make you tipsy either by disordering the stomach, or the head. Good wine does the latter alone: bad wine both.

When wine is declared to be unwholesome from its stimulating properties, it is unnecessary to reprobate the use of ardent spirits. Their total exclusion from the diet of persons under training is their sufficient condemnation. Mr. Jackson says:-"In training, spirits are never allowed on any consideration whatever." Their parching quality is not redeemed, or redeemable, by any means; they heat the stomach, derange the liver, and lead, as Dr. Bright has pointed out, to structural disease of the kidneys, crowning

their deleterious agency by shattering and overthrowing the brain and nervous system. Yet they have their use, like night-shade, and hemlock, and tobacco *. They sometimes will recruit flagging vitality, when threatened with imminent extinction, and when all other means would be insufficient. A case, which I witnessed some years ago, made a deep impression upon me a lady had been confined six days before, and had had no rest in the anxious attempt, to which she was unequal, of nursing her infant. She suddenly felt that she was dying. Her pulse intermitted, her hands and forehead were cold, and her features wore the character of dissolution. Happening to be in the house, I gave her brandy, which revived her a little, but she again fell into the same alarming state, and was again revived by the same means. In this way she passed the night, oscillating between existence and death, during which she drank two-thirds of a bottle of brandy, which certainly preserved her life.

* I have not introduced any notice of tobacco. It is certainly deleterious. Dr. Mott assures me that in the United States it is not uncommon to see persons whose hands tremble nervously, and whose minds are permanently affected by its baneful influence. I have been told that many young men at Cambridge and Oxford have temporarily injured their healths in a similar way, though to a less extent; and I have known more than one instance of men advanced in life, who have been compelled to discontinue its use from its effect upon the head, produced disturbed and troubled sleep and headache.

According to regal authority, smoking "is a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs; and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless."-James the First's Counterblast to Tobacco.

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III. QUANTITY OF FOOD.

DIFFERENT quantities of nutriment are required at different ages, by persons of different sexes, constitutions, habits of life. But every one possessed of moderate powers of observation can tell how much he individually requires.

A gentleman, upwards of seventy, as remarkable for his healthy and hale appearance, as early distinguished for his contributions to science, whom I remember to have heard questioned at dinner why he was so abstemious, answered, that he had always made it a rule to eat half only that he could, and that he believed he owed his health to the practice.

It may not appear to all easy to stop at this period of a repast, or even to know when they have reached it; but it is in the power of every one to observe when his first appetite is satisfied; after which some are tempted to begin again, and to start as it were with a second wind. This first appeasement of the appetitite no one will overlook, if he masticates slowly, and directs his attention to the point before drinking a glass of wine.

There is a rougher rule for determining the quantity of food; which is, not to eat as much as will produce sensations of fulness, weight, oppression, torpor, languor, chilliness: the objection to this rule is, that it requires a few excesses to furnish data for the calculation.

However he may learn to determine the limit, a person of sense will, as his habit, stop at every meal before he reaches a point which will leave him less capable than before of any exertion, mental or bodily. Rousseau, himself a gourmand, somewhere introduces the remark, (that has a justness not often met with in his ferment of vitiated morality,) ABSTINENCE IS THE EPICURISM OF REASON.

Drinks are generally as essential to the system as food: the water of which they principally consist is necessary to make up for the constant waste of fluid. Much less drink, however, is required than might be supposed; on this occasion the appetite is no guide. It is true, indeed, that a person is not to drink unless he is thirsty; but it does not follow that he should drink because he is so. Nothing promotes thirst so much as quenching it, or grows more readily into habit than drinking. Much liquid weakens the stomach, and produces flatulence and fat.

The latter consequence has, perhaps, hardly been sufficiently attended to in rules laid down for those who have a disposition to obesity to combat. It is most remarkably exemplified in a case recorded in the second volume of the Transactions of the College of Physicians, of which the following is an abstract:

Thomas Wood, a miller of Billericay, in Essex, was born in 1719, and, having grown to manhood, lived intemperately, eating fat meat three times a day, and drinking strong ale. About the age of forty, he became extremely fat; but continuing well, he pur

sued his accustomed habits. In his forty-fourth year, indigestion, sickness, suffocation, swimmings in the head, and apoplexy, supervened; when, becoming acquainted with the writings of Cornaro, he determined to leave off his excesses. This he did gradually, and his health amended. In January, 1765, his allowance of animal food being now much reduced, he entirely left off ale, and drank water only. Still he was troubled with rheumatism and gout. He then took more exercise, used cold bathing, and left off animal food; and gradually was led to leave off drinking entirely, and to limit his food for the twentyfour hours to a pudding composed of one pound of the flour of which the best kind of sea-biscuit is made, boiled with a pint and a half of skimmed milk, without any other addition. It was conjectured that he lost ten, or perhaps eleven stone weight in the process of restoring himself "from the condition of a decrepit old man, to perfect health, and to the vigour and activity of youth." His pulse fell, in the process of reduction, to from forty-four to forty-seven pulsations in a minute.

When asked, "what first induced him to abstain from drink," he answered, that it happened one day that the servant had forgotten to bring his water at dinner as usual; that being then full of business, he did not think of calling for any; and that, having found himself easier and less oppressed by that meal than common, he determined to try whether a total omission of all liquids might not be an improvement