The most salutary kind of drink next to malt liquor, and spruce beer, is wine. The benefit which the fleet derived from it at different times, and the advantage it has over spirits has been often taken notice of in the former part of this work. It seems to be owing to this that the French fleet sometimes enjoys superior health to ours, and is less subject to the scurvy[78]. Wine is also preferable to every other medicine in that low fever with which ships are so much infested; and there is no cordial equal to good wine in recruiting men who are recovering. Spirits differ from wine in this respect, that they are a mere chemical liquor, incapable of assimilation with our fluids, having lost in distillation the native vegetable principle in which the whole of its nutritious quality and great part of its medical virtue resides. The abuse of spirituous liquors is extremely pernicious every where, both as an interruption to duty, and as it is injurious to health. It is particularly so in the West Indies, both because the rum is of a bad and unwholesome quality, and because this species of debauchery is more hurtful in a hot than in a cold climate. It is with reason that the new rum is accused of being more unwholesome than what is old; for, being long kept, it not only becomes weaker and more mellow by part of the spirit exhaling, but time is allowed for the evaporation of a certain nauseous empyreumatic principle which comes over in the distillation, and which is very offensive to the stomach; therefore, though this is the produce of the West-India islands, yet what is supplied there is inferior to that which is brought from England. It was originally the custom to serve seamen with their allowance of spirits undiluted. The method now in use, of adding water to it, was first introduced by Admiral Vernon in the year 1740, and got the name of _grog_. This was a great improvement; for the quantity of half a pint, which is the daily legal allowance to each man, will intoxicate most people to a considerable degree, if taken at once in a pure state. The superiority of wine over spirits in any shape was so conspicuous, that towards the end of the war the fleets in the West Indies and North America were supplied with nothing but wine, and with a success sufficient to encourage the continuance of the same practice in future. Of WATER. As water is a necessary of life, and as the health and comfort of men at sea depend upon its quality, it deserves particular attention.