the lungs, the kidneys, the perspiration glands, at once set to work to throw off the enemy. So surely is this the case, that the breath of a person who has drunk only a single glass of the lightest beer will betray the fact. The alcohol thus eliminated is entirely unchanged. Nature apparently makes no effort to appropriate it. [Footnote: It was formerly a question considerably discussed, whether alcohol exists in the brain, or in the fluid found in the ventricles, in intoxicated persons. This was settled by Percy, who found alcohol in the brain and liver of dogs poisoned with alcohol, and of men who had died after excessive drinking. In these experiments, the presence of alcohol was determined by distillation, and the distilled substance burned with a blue flame, and dissolved camphor.-- FLINT'S _Physiology of Man_.] It courses everywhere through the circulation, and into the great organs, with all its properties unmodified. Alcohol, then, is not, like bread or beef, taken hold of, broken up by the mysterious process of digestion, and used by the body. [Footnote: Because of the difficulties of such an experiment, we have not yet been able to account satisfactorily by the excretions for all the alcohol taken into the stomach. This remains as yet one of the unsolved problems of physiological chemistry. To collect the whole of the insensible perspiration, for example, is well-nigh impossible. It was supposed at one time that a part of the alcohol is oxidized--_i. e._, burned, in the system. But such a process would impart heat, and it is now proved that alcohol cools, instead of warms, the blood. Moreover, the closest analysis fails to detect in the circulation any trace of the products of alcoholic combustion, such as aldehyde and acetic acid. "The fact," says Flint, "that alcohol is always eliminated, even when drunk in minute quantity, and that its elimination continues for a considerable time, gradually diminishing, renders it probable that all that is taken into the body is removed."] "It can not therefore be regarded as an aliment," or food.-- FLINT. "Beer, wine, and spirits," says Liebig, "contain no element capable of entering into the composition of the blood or the muscular fiber." [Footnote: The small amount of nutritive substance, chiefly sugar derived from the grain or fruit used in the manufacture of beer or wine, can not, of course, be compared with that contained in bread or beef at the same cost. Liebig says, in his Letters on Chemistry, "We can prove, with mathematical certainty, that as much flour as can lie on the point of a table knife is more nutritious than eight quarts of the best Bavarian beer."] "That alcohol is incapable of forming any part of the body," remarks Cameron, "is admitted by all physiologists. It can not be converted into brain, nerve, muscle, or blood."