No high authorities are demanded for the refutation of this. A little common sense properly used is quite sufficient. It is evident that a medicine, properly so-called, is something which is capable of producing a disturbing or alterative effect on the body generally or some particular organ. The skill of the physician consists in so applying this disturbing agency as to produce an alteration of the state of disease, a direct conversion of the state of disease to a state of health, if possible (which is rarely the case), or more usually the conversion of one state of disease into another of milder character. But, when we are in a state of sound health, any disturbance or alteration must be a change for the worse, must throw us out of health to an extent proportionate to the potency of the drug. I might illustrate this by a multitude of familiar examples, but they would carry me too far away from my proper subject. There is, however, one class of such remedies which are directly connected with the chemistry of cookery. I refer to the condiments that act as ‘tonics,’ excluding common salt, which is an article of food, though often miscalled a condiment. Salt is food simply because it supplies the blood with one of its normal and necessary constituents, chloride of sodium, without which we cannot live. A certain quantity of it exists in most of our ordinary food, but not always sufficient. Cayenne pepper may be selected as a typical example of a condiment properly so-called. Mustard is a food and condiment combined; this is the case with some others. Curry powders are mixtures of very potent condiments with more or less of farinaceous materials, and sulphur compounds, which, like the oil of mustard, of onions, garlic, &c., may have a certain amount of special nutritive value. The mere condiment is a stimulating drug that does its work directly upon the inner lining of the stomach, by exciting it to increased and abnormal activity. A dyspeptic may obtain immediate relief by using cayenne pepper. Among the advertised patent medicines is a pill bearing the very ominous name of its compounder, the active constituent of which is cayenne. Great relief and temporary comfort is commonly obtained by using it as a ‘dinner pill.’ If thus used only as a temporary remedy for an acute and temporary, or exceptional, attack of indigestion all is well, but the cayenne, whether taken in pills or dusted over the food or stewed with it in curries or any otherwise, is one of the most cruel of slow poisons when taken _habitually_. Thousands of poor wretches are crawling miserably towards their graves, the victims of the multitude of maladies of both mind and body that are connected with chronic, incurable dyspepsia, all brought about by the habitual use of cayenne and its condimental cousins.