Charenton 855 134 Bicêtre and Salpêtrière 2012 414 Bordeaux 156 20 Turin, 1830-31 158 17 ” 1831-36 390 76 Gard 209 4 United States 551 146 Palermo 189 9 Caen 60 16 Dundee 14 4 M. Parchappe 167 46 M. Batten 288 54 ———— ——— 5019 940 Commenting on these figures, Mr Walter Blyth remarks, “There may be another explanation of the fact that many mad people have been great drinkers. A large proportion of those subject to insanity are driven by their morbid minds to drink; so that it may be that insanity causes drink, and not drink causes insanity.” Many medical writers who are no advocates for the total abandonment of alcohol limit its consumption, in healthy people, to one or two fluid ounces a day, in the form of wine, beer, or spirits and water; two fluid ounces is, we believe, the quantity apportioned daily to every able-bodied seaman in the Royal Navy. Any slight habitual departure from this standard——even when the evidences of excess are not perceptible to others——all authority, historical, pathological, and physiological (unless it be given as a medicine), shows to be injurious. The researches of Anstie, Parkes, and Count Wollowicz, appear to prove that any quantity of alcohol exceeding an ounce and a half taken by an adult showed itself in the urine, a circumstance which these writers look upon as tending to show that the system has taken more alcohol than can be used in the body itself. In slight doses the action of alcohol is to produce a sedative effect upon the nerves, to redden slightly the lining membrane of the stomach, and to stimulate the secretion of the gastric juice. Thus, in small doses alcohol may, and doubtless does, promote appetite. In excess, however, all these effects are turned to evil, and then ensue an inflammatory condition of the stomach, compression of the gland ducts from thickening of the tissue around them, excessive mucous secretion, and great loss of appetite. When carried into the circulation it greatly increases the force of the heart’s action, and at the same time paralyses, as it were, the restraining nervous supply to the arteries and small vessels, so that they can no longer oppose themselves to the blood-current, but dilate. This action in a small degree, occurring in persons of a weak and languid circulation, is no doubt beneficial; on the other hand, when in excess, it is most dangerous, and is a cause of the greater part of the diseases of the heart and great vessels.