“The water cure is a stomachic, since it invariably increases the appetite.” Dr. Pereira states— “It is a vital stimulus, and is more essential to our existence than aliment.” Liebig, the celebrated physiological chemist, bears similar testimony, viz.—“It increases the appetite.” Are these effects consistent with lowering the tone of the stomach? are they not, on the contrary, the strongest evidence of the TONIC effects of water? Some objectors say, “water drinking thins the blood.” After demolishing these objections by arguments which we regret we have not space to quote, Dr. Gully concludes his observations as follows;— “But the whole assertion regarding thin blood proceeds on grounds that betray intense ignorance, both of physiology and of the water cure. It supposes that the whole water imbibed enters into, and remains in the circulating blood, quasi water, that no chemical transformation of it takes place in the body at all: this is ignorance of physiology. And it supposes that ALL who are treated by water are told to drink the same, and that a large quantity, without discrimination of the individual cases of disease presented: this is ignorance of the water cure. So between the horns of this compound ignorance, and of wilful misrepresentation, we leave the declaimers about the ‘thinning of the blood.’” It is a curious fact that in all the medical works which treat of anaemia, or bloodlessness, “allusion is never once made to water-drinking as a known cause—not even to the possibility of its being a cause of it.” In so flagrant a case of thin blood, why has this principal cause been omitted? It is further curious that this injurious effect of water was never invented, much less preached, until Hydropathy was found to be making inconvenient strides in public favour. Is the reader aware that eighty per cent. of water enters into the composition of healthy blood, without making any allowance for the enormous quantity required for the various secretions? Granting, however, for the sake of argument, that all, and more than these objectors urge, were true, we still have a kind of feeling that water is more congenial to the system than prussic acid, or even iodine. But we may be wrong. Perhaps there is no disease which would appear, at first sight, so little suited for Hydropathic treatment as cholera; [15] that disease for the successful treatment of which we have been hitherto accustomed to consider stimulants and hot applications of all kinds as indispensably necessary, and yet there is no disease, in the treatment of which Hydropathy has been more successful.