Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's practice approaches nearer to abstinence as he grows older. The Bishop of Durham finds that, on the whole, he can work for more consecutive hours, and with greater application, than when he used stimulants. This, too, is the testimony of Bishop Temple. The Rev. Stopford Brooke is enthusiastic in his praise of total abstinence: it has enabled him to work better; it has increased the pleasure of life; and it has banished depression. Sir Henry Thompson declares himself better without wine, and better able to accomplish his work. Dr. Richardson declares that he never did more work, or more varied work; that he never did work with so much facility, or with such a complete sense of freedom from anxiety and worry as he has done during the period he has abstained from alcohol. On the other hand, Sir Erskine May's experience of abstinence was that it made him "dyspeptic and stupid;" and Dr. W. B. Carpenter "can get on best, while in London, by taking with his dinner a couple of glasses of very light claret, as an aid to digestion." But when on holiday, he says, he does not need it. A _natural_ stimulant then takes the place of an artificial one; and so long as a man is healthy, eating well, and sleeping well, he is, Dr. Brunton declares, better without alcohol. Although there is no comparison between the evils of smoking and those of drinking, most of the writers seem to attach more importance to the question of smoking, and some regard the question of alcohol as of no consequence. Mr. Cornelius Walford considers tobacco a more insidious stimulant than alcoholic beverages. It can, he points out, be indulged in constantly without visible degradation; but surely it saps the mind. Mr. Hyde Clarke is of the same opinion, and remarks, "a man knows when he is drunk, but he does not know when he has smoked too much, until the effects of accumulation have made themselves permanent." There is a growing conviction that tobacco does quite as much harm to the nervous system as alcohol. [Footnote: There can be no room to question the presumption that an excessive use of tobacco _does_ occasionally deteriorate the moral character, as the inordinate use of chloral or bromide of potassium may deprave the mind, by lowering the tone of certain of the nervous centres, in narcotising them and impairing their nutrition. Whether the nicotine of the tobacco can act on nerve-cells as alcohol acts may be doubtful, but the victim of excess in the use of tobacco certainly often very closely resembles the habitual drinker of small drams--the tippler who seldom becomes actually drunk--and he readily falls into the same maudlin state as that which seems characteristic of the subject of slow intoxication by chloral, or of the victim of bromide.--_The Lancet_, Nov. 12, 1881.]