end of seven
or eight hours, or even some days, the food is scarcely acted upon at
all. This is a fact; and if you are led to ask why, I answer, because
alcohol has the peculiar power of chemically affecting or decomposing
the gastric juice by precipitating one of its principal constituents,
viz., pepsine, rendering its solvent properties much less efficacious.
Hence alcohol can not be considered either as food or as a solvent for
food. Not as the latter certainly, for it refuses to act with the
gastric juice.

"'It is a remarkable fact,' says Dr. Dundas Thompson, 'that alcohol,
when added to the digestive fluid, produces a white precipitate, so that
the fluid is no longer capable of digesting animal or vegetable matter.'
'The use of alcoholic stimulants,' say Drs. Todd and Bowman, 'retards
digestion by coagulating the pepsine, an essential element of the
gastric juice, and thereby interfering with its action. Were it not that
wine and spirits are rapidly absorbed, the introduction of these into
the stomach, in any quantity, would be a complete bar to the digestion
of food, as the pepsine would be precipitated from the solution as
quickly as it was formed by the stomach.' Spirit, in any quantity, as a
dietary adjunct, is pernicious on account of its antiseptic qualities,
which resist the digestion of food by the absorption of water from its
particles, in direct antagonism to chemical operation."

ITS EFFECT ON THE BLOOD.

Dr. Richardson, in his lectures on alcohol, given both in England and
America, speaking of the action of this substance on the blood after
passing from the stomach, says:

"Suppose, then, a certain measure of alcohol be taken into the stomach,
it will be absorbed there, but, previous to absorption, it will have to
undergo a proper degree of dilution with water, for there is this
peculiarity respecting alcohol when it is separated by an animal
membrane from a watery fluid like the blood, that it will not pass
through the membrane until it has become charged, to a given point of
dilution, with water. It is itself, in fact, _so greedy for water, it
will pick it up from watery textures, and deprive them of it until, by
its saturation, its power of reception is exhausted_, after which it
will diffuse into the current of circulating fluid."

It is this power of absorbing water from every texture with which
alcoholic spirits comes in contact, that creates the burning thirst of
those who freely indulg