Nor is this the worst consequence of the immoral and unsocial act: for the unhappy wretch who is addicted to the habitual and vicious use of ardent spirits, besides subjecting himself to the attack of “the whole army of diseases” which assault the human frame from intoxication, often exhibits a more awful demonstration of the consequences of violating the laws of morality and social decency: I allude to the extraordinary fact of the spontaneous combustion of the body, which has often terminated the existence of old and inveterate drunkards. This combustion is occasioned in such persons from the whole fabric of the body being so changed, by the constant practice of spirit-drinking, with inflammable matter (probably hydrogen); or, chemically speaking, it acquires so powerful an attraction for oxygen, that it suddenly takes fire, (in some instances spontaneously, in others from the flame of a candle or too powerful a heat of the fire,) and the body is reduced to a cinder. The persons in whom this dreadful visitation of apparently supernatural punishment for the violation of the laws of nature has occurred, have been chiefly women. In some cases the unhappy sufferers have been found burning, “sometimes with an open flame flickering over the body, sometimes with a smothered heat or fire, without any open flame whatever; whilst the application of water has occasionally seemed rather to quicken than impede the combustion. “In no instance has the fire or flame thereby excited in the body been so powerful as essentially to injure the most combustible substances immediately adjoining it, as linen or woollen furniture. “The event has usually taken place at night, when the sufferer has been alone, and has commonly been discovered by the fœtid penetrating scent of sooty films, which have spread to a considerable distance. The unhappy subject has in every instance been found dead, and more or less completely burnt up.” The above awful account is quoted from Dr. Mason Good’s “Study of Medicine;” but relations of numerous cases of the above horrid termination of existence may be found in the Philosophical Transactions, Vols. 63 and 64, in Dr. Young’s “Medical Literature,” and in a variety of Foreign Journals, medical as well as general. Let all those who are addicted to habitual intoxication and the consumption of the infernal compositions of nefarious dealers in spirits, read and re-read the above quotation, and may they take warning, and renounce that unhappy propensity.