its way out chiefly by the kidneys, and provides in many shapes effective means of irritation. Physiological repose is to be sought, not by debarring the gland of the harmless and necessary solvent, but by cutting off the materials of urea and uric acid.” How naturally, then, do we look for the continuing sentiments: “‘Spare diet and spring water clear’ may often be found sufficient though simple remedies. _Of all diuretics water is the best._”[45] But how can we reconcile, with such counsel, the treatment that he himself commonly adopts? [Footnote 45: Ibid., p. 86. The italics are my own, and I am amazed to find that this best diuretic is rarely the one used, and never fairly tested by this authority, who seems almost to exhaust the _materia medica_ in the treatment of even infants of tender age.] In one case noted by him, and in which, as he says, “the attack was slight,” and “the boy became convalescent,” but later, although under the doctor’s own eye at the hospital, with “no evidence of his having taken cold,” he became worse, went on to a fatal termination, “the urine becoming loaded with albumen and abounding with fibrinous casts——convulsive attacks——death!” It seems to me easy enough, however, to reconcile the unfavorable turn and the fatal termination with the treatment he adopted, viz., digitalis instead of “the best diuretic” (water); “fluid diet,” consisting chiefly of beef-tea——a non-nutritive fluid whose solid constituents are mainly urea, kreatine, kreatinine, isoline, and decomposed hæmatine, exactly the animal constituents of the urine, except that there is but a trace of urea.[46] [Footnote 46: London _Lancet_.]