Sleeplessness is a frequent cause of the formation of a poison habit, and for this purpose chloral hydrate, perhaps, is capable of producing more serious results than any other drug of its class. The fact that it accumulates in the system, and that the dose needs constantly to be increased, always renders its use dangerous in unskilled hands. Many gifted men have fallen victims to the habit, among others Dante Rossetti, who seldom was without a bottle of the narcotic near him. Latterly, sulphonal, a drug derived from coal tar, possessing hypnotic properties, has been largely taken; and antipyrine, now a popular remedy for headache, is capable of forming a pernicious and dangerous habit. The practice of self-dosing with drugs of this description cannot be too strongly deprecated. Some people form a curious habit of taking one drug till at last they become imbued with the idea that that only and nothing else, will have any effect on them. The only remedy Carlyle would ever take, according to the late Sir Richard Quain who was his medical adviser, was Grey powder. "Grey powder was his favourite remedy when he had that wretched dyspepsia from which he suffered, and which was fully accounted for by the fact that he was particularly fond of very nasty gingerbread. Many times I have seen him, sitting in the chimney corner, smoking a clay pipe and eating this gingerbread." Oliver Goldsmith also laboured under the confirmed belief that the only medicine that would have any effect on him was "James' Powder." He doctored himself with this favourite nostrum whenever he felt unwell, and believed it to be a cure for all ills. According to a West End physician quite a new and most reprehensible vice has recently become fashionable--viz., a craze that has arisen among women for smoking green tea, in the form of cigarettes. Though adopted by some fair ladies merely as a pastime, not a few of its votaries are women of high education and mental attainments. "Among my patients," he states, "suffering from extreme nervousness and insomnia, is a young lady, highly distinguished, at Girton. Another is a lady novelist, whose books are widely read, and who habitually smoked twenty or thirty of these cigarettes nightly when writing, for their stimulating effect." Though tea does not contain a trace of any poisonous principle, it can, when thus misused, exert a most harmful influence. Doubtless, the high pressure at which most of the dwellers in our great cities now live, and the worry of too much brain work on one hand, or the lack of occupation on the other, is one of the chief causes of taking up habits of this kind.