If you will fasten your attention on the single fact, that alcohol hardens this albuminous substance with which I place it in contact, you will have in that single strategic circumstance an explanation of most of its ravages upon the blood and nerves and brain. I beg you to notice that the white of an egg in the goblet does not become hardened by exposure to the air. I have allowed it to remain exposed for a time, in order that you may see that there is no legerdemain in this experiment. [Laughter.] I now pour alcohol upon this albuminous fluid, and if the result here is what it has been in other cases, I shall pretty soon be able to show you a very good example of what coagulated albumen is in the nervous system and blood corpuscles. You will find this white of an egg gradually so hardened that you can take it out without a fork. I notice already that a mysterious change in it has begun. A strange thickening shoots through the fluid mass. This is your moderate drunkard that I am stirring up now. There is your tippler, a piece of him, [holding up a portion of the coagulated mass upon the glass pestle]. The coagulation of the substance of the brain and of the nervous system goes on. I am stirring up a hard drinker now. The infinitely subtle laws of chemistry take their course. Here is a man [holding up a part of the coagulated mass] whose brain is so leathery that he is a beast, and kicks his wife to death. I am stirring up in this goblet now the brain of a hardened sot. On this prongless glass rod, I hold up the large part of the white of an egg which you saw poured into this glass as a fluid. Here is your man [holding up a larger mass] who has benumbed his conscience and his reason both, and has begun to be dangerous to society from the effects of a diseased brain. Wherever alcohol touches this albuminous substance, it hardens it, and it does so by absorbing and fixing the water it contains. I dip out of the goblet now your man in delirium tremens. Here is what was once a fluid, rolling easily to right and left, and now you have the leathery brain and the hard heart. Distortions of blood discs taken from the veins of drunkards have been shown to you here by the stereopticon and the best microscope in the United States. All the amazing alterations you saw in the shape, color, and contents of the blood discs are produced by the affinity of alcohol for the water in the albuminous portion of the globules.