Dr. Segur asserts that “habitual coffee-drinkers generally enjoy good health and live to a good old age.” We find, however, that a very large proportion of those coffee-drinkers who are observing and conscientious freely confess to the ill effects of the beverage: It makes them “nervous, irritable, or gives them headache frequently,” they say; and it is quite common to hear them declare that they would leave it off if they could, but they “depend on it——it is the principal part of breakfast.” Often enough it is all the breakfast taken. It prevents hunger or appeases it by rendering the stomach anæmic, and its stimulating effects are mistaken for added strength. And it is even worse where the coffee-drinker is at the same time a full-feeder; for, are we not told that this beverage “lessens the waste of tissue and renders less food necessary?” Quite a percentage of even robust people, beginning to feel, or to recognize after having long felt, the twinges of dyspepsia do, either on their own judgment or by the advice of the family physician, give up the habit, and find great benefit from the change; and but for clinging to other unnatural practices, they might often bid adieu to all their physical ills. A few, comparatively, of the most vigorous men and women, it can not be denied, do “enjoy good health and live to a good old age,” in spite of many injurious practices, including the habitual use of the stimulant coffee. But even these have their intervals of suffering, more or less severe——“attacks” that better habits would prevent. Of the latter class, out of scores whom I might mention, the experience of O. B. Frothingham is noteworthy. He says: “Although no positive ill effect has been traceable to either of them [tea and coffee] or wine, all of which have been used sparingly, yet, were my life to live over again, I should accustom myself to abstinence from all three. It seems to me now, on looking back, that something of dullness and languor, something of exhaustion and dreaminess, something of lethargy, something too of heat and irritability, may be chargeable to a practice not in any grave degree harmful or blameworthy. The faculties have been less keen and patient than they would have been under a strictly natural regimen.” It might, perhaps, in this connection, be profitable to ask, WHAT IS A “STIMULANT”?