ss this extreme vascular condition in the lungs, and once I had the
unusual, though unhappy opportunity of observing the same phenomenon in
the brain of a man who, in a paroxysm of alcoholic delirium, cast
himself under the wheels of a railway carriage. The brain,
instantaneously thrown out from the skull by the crash, was before me
within three minutes after the accident. It exhaled the odor of spirit
most distinctly, and its membranes and minute structures were vascular
in the extreme. It looked as if it had been recently injected with
vermilion injection. The white matter of the cerebrum, studded with red
points, could scarcely be distinguished when it was incised, it was so
preternaturally red; and the pia mater, or internal vascular membrane
covering the brain, resembled a delicate web of coagulated red blood, so
tensely were its fine vessels engorged. This condition extended through
both the larger and the smaller brain, cerebrum, and cerebellum, but was
not so marked in the medulla, or commencing portion of the spinal cord,
as in the other portions.

In course of time, in persons accustomed to alcohol, the vascular
changes, temporary only in the novitiate, become confirmed and
permanent. The bloom on the nose which characterizes the genial toper is
the established sign of alcoholic action on the vascular structure.

Recently, physiological research has served to explain the reason why,
under alcohol the heart at first beats so quickly, why the pulse rises,
and why the minute blood-vessels become so strongly injected.

At one time it was imagined that alcohol acts immediately upon the heart
by stimulating it to increased motion; and from this idea,--false idea,
I should say,--of the primary action of alcohol, many erroneous
conclusions have been drawn. We have now learned that there exist many
chemical bodies which act in the same manner as alcohol, and that their
effect is not to stimulate the heart, but to weaken the contractile
force of the extreme and minute vessels which the heart fills with blood
at each of its strokes. These bodies produce, in fact, a paralysis of
the organic nervous supply of the vessels which constitute the minute
vascular structures. The minute vessels when paralysed offer inefficient
resistance to the force of the heart, and the pulsating organ thus
liberated, like the main-spring of a clock from which the resistance has
been removed, quickens in action, dilating the feebly resistant v