Coffee is a _diuretic_, and hence its habitual use promotes disease of the kidneys. “Very warm drinks are in themselves debilitating to the stomach, but the addition of the properties of tea, coffee, or other herbs, burdens the kidneys and urinary apparatus with an unnatural amount of labor continually. (See Bright’s Disease.) These organs, kept constantly over-excited, must become debilitated, and preternaturally irritable, and this condition of debility and irritability extends sympathetically to all the surrounding viscera; finally, the abdominal muscles themselves become relaxed, and, with the general nervous exhaustion produced by the active nervine and narcotic properties of the herb throughout the system, a foundation is laid for the whole train of maladies, displacements of organs, disordered functions, and ‘weaknesses,’ which are so general at the present day.” Again, coffee is often referred to as a respiratory food. It does, in small doses, and at first, have the effect to excite abnormally the nerves governing the respiratory movements, as well as those of the heart, stomach, etc.——stimulates them; hence the tendency, finally, to sluggish action of these organs, and even paralysis: a peculiar type of “nightmare” often met with among coffee and tobacco users, illustrates this well, although the connection is not usually comprehended,——a feeling of suffocation, following one of pressure, or “rushing feeling,” at the base of the brain, as it is often described; usually observed at night just as the individual is dropping off to sleep, seemingly at the very moment of “losing” himself, and very naturally, too, at this particular moment: prior thereto there had been somewhat of a constrained feeling, perhaps, unobserved by the victim, who, while awake, would continue the process of breathing by means of an unconscious, but still real, degree of voluntary effort. In sleep, the suffocation which ensues causes the victim to wake with a start and with a violent palpitation of the heart; or he may not succeed in rousing himself: this means death. In fact, all stimulants and poisons, as tobacco, coffee, distilled liquors, etc., _tend_ to local and general paralysis.