sherry or port may contain as much as twenty-five per
cent. by volume. Brandy over fifty; gin, thirty-eight; rum, forty-eight;
whisky, forty-three; vin ordeinaire, eight; strong ale, fourteen;
champagne, ten to eleven; it matters not which, if the quantity of
alcohol be regulated by the amount present in the liquor imbibed. When
we reach the two ounces, a distinct physiological effect follows,
leading on to that first stage of excitement with which we are now
conversant. The reception of the spirit arrested at this point, there
need be no important mischief done to the organism; but if the quantity
imbibed be increased, further changes quickly occur. We have seen that
all the organs of the body are built upon the vascular structures, and
therefore it follows that a prolonged paralysis of the minute
circulation must of necessity lead to disturbance in other organs than
the heart."

OTHER ORGANS INVOLVED.

"By common observation, the flush seen on the cheek during the first
stage of alcoholic excitation, is presumed to extend merely to the parts
actually exposed to view. It cannot, however, be too forcibly impressed
that the condition is universal in the body. If the lungs could be seen,
they, too, would be found with their vessels injected; if the brain and
spinal cord could be laid open to view, they would be discovered in the
same condition; if the stomach, the liver, the spleen, the kidneys or
any other vascular organs or parts could be exposed, the vascular
engorgement would be equally manifest. In the lower animals, I have been
able to witness this extreme vascular condition in the lungs, and there
are here presented to you two drawings from nature, showing, one the
lungs in a natural state of an animal killed by a sudden blow, the other
the lungs of an animal killed equally suddenly, but at a time when it
was under the influence of alcohol. You will see, as if you were looking
at the structures themselves, how different they are in respect to the
blood which they contained, how intensely charged with blood is the lung
in which the vessels had been paralyzed by the alcoholic Spirit."

EFFECT ON THE BRAIN.

"I once had the unusual, though unhappy, opportunity of observing the
same phenomenon in the brain structure of a man, who, in a paroxysm of
alcoholic excitement, decapitated himself under the wheel of a railway
carriage, and whose brain was instantaneously evolved from the skull by
the crash. The brain it