The progressive physician does not believe that medicines _cure_. It is true he uses the word just as we say the sun rises and sets when we know that it does neither the one or the other, but that the phenomena are due to the revolution of the earth on its axis. The cell function is the building function, you may call it metabolism or anabolism. It is either a building or a repairing process. Now derange the process by means of toxines, and you have what may be called katabolism. The molecules are disorganized, the tissues become disorganized, and the result is impaired function. A remedy reaches the part; among the molecules of the remedy and the molecules of the protoplasmic cells chemism takes place; the toxine is antagonized, antidoted, neutralized, changed, and the metabolic process is established. This is the natural physiological process, and a healthy action results; and herein I have thought may be the secret of the action of minute doses. I will illustrate. In the chemical laboratory you have a combination of mercuric sulphate with about four-fifths its weight of chloride of sodium; and heating in a test-tube the result is mercuric chloride (HgCl{_2}), or corrosive sublimate. Repeat the experiment by using mercurous sulphate, with about a third of its weight of chloride of sodium, applying heat, and you have mercurous chloride (HgCl), calomel. Here by diminishing the amount of chlorine in one of the experiments you have quite a different result, due to quantivalence. Why, then, if the process of katabolism be chemical, may not a result be altogether different among the atoms of the molecules of the cells and of the medicine, in accordance with the law of definite proportions? If quantivalence exists among chemical radicals, why may it not exist among organic radicals? J. F. GRIFFIN, M.D., The Medical Summary, Jan., 1894. _DIGESTIVE LEUCOCYTOSIS._