To illustrate more fully these general principles, we will take, for example, the chemical changes that may take place in the hemoglobin of the blood. Hemoglobin is a proteid containing iron. It is a complex chemical compound and reacts with other substances very readily. In the lungs it combines with oxygen. In the muscles, this oxyhemoglobin is again received into the original body-substances. This life-giving process is only one of the many thousands selected by evolution from the millions of chemical changes possible in nature. [Sidenote: Effect of carbon monoxid upon the hemoglobin of the blood] When carbon monoxid, which is present in illuminating gas, is breathed into the lungs, it combines with hemoglobin, producing a compound which prevents the formation of oxyhemoglobin, thus stopping the process of oxidation in the body, and death is the result. [Sidenote: Drug theory declining] In proportion as science has shown the origin of life, and the methods by which it has been sustained and developed, the use of drugs as a remedial agent has declined. This line of reasoning followed to its logical end, points with unerring certainty to the total abandonment of the drug theory of treating dis-ease except, perhaps, as anesthetics and disinfectants. [Sidenote: Treatment of dis-ease by disinfection] The means of combating dis-ease by disinfection is sometimes confused with the general system of drugging. The modern methods of preventing and of combating contagious dis-eases by disinfection are in harmony with the best known sanitary laws. These results depend, not upon the ignorant and the harmful theories on which general drug medication was founded, but upon the latest and the most scientific knowledge. [Sidenote: Patent medicines and the doctor's prescription] In the recent magazine exposures of patent medicines, the chief trend of argument was that these stock remedies were evil because the user took opium, cocain, or whisky without a doctor's prescription. This standpoint is more amusing than instructive. Just why a poison taken without a doctor's prescription should be dangerous, and its sale a crime, while the sale and the use of the same drug over a doctor's prescription should be highly recommended, is rather difficult to comprehend, and this the enterprising journals have not explained. The exposé that is most needed is not of a few poisonous patent preparations, but of the fundamental folly of interfering with Nature's work by any form of poisoning. Poison is poison whether advertised in a newspaper as a "New Discovery," or prescribed by a reputable representative of the "Ancient Order of Medicine Men."