opium partially survived disorganization of the superficial nerves. Of that surviving tissue, one mucous patch was irredeemably gone. (This particular fact was the one which cessation from opium more distinctly unmasked.) At noon he had become tolerably comfortable; before I left (7 P.M.) he had enjoyed a single half-hour of something like normal slumber. He will have to take opium all his life. Further struggle is suicide. Death will probably occur at any rate not from an attack of what we usually consider disease, but from the disintegrating effects on tissue of the habit itself. So, whatever he may do, his organs march to death. He will have to continue the habit which kills him only because abandoning it kills him sooner; for self-murder has dropped out of the purview of the moral faculties and become a mere animal question of time. The only way left him to preserve his intellectual faculties intact is to keep his future daily dose at the tolerable minimum. Henceforth all his dreams of entire liberty must be relegated to the world to come. He may be valuable as a monitor, but in the executive uses of this mighty modern world henceforth he can never share. Could the immortal soul find itself in a more inextricable, a more _grisly_ complication? In publishing his case I am not violating that Hippocratic vow which protects the relations of patient and adviser; for, as I dropped my friend's wasted hand and stepped to the threshold, he repeated a request he had often made to me, saying: "It is almost like Dives asking for a messenger to his brethren; but tell them, tell _all young men,_ what it is, 'that they come not into this torment.'" Already perhaps--by the mere statement of the case--I might be considered to have fulfilled my promise. But since monition often consists as much in enlightenment as intimidation, let me be pardoned for briefly presenting a few considerations regarding the action of opium upon the human system while living, and the peculiar methods by which the drug encompasses its death. WHAT IS OPIUM? It is the most complicated drug in the Pharmacopoeia. Though apparently a simple gummy paste, it possesses a constitution which analysis reveals to contain no less than 25 elements, each one of them a compound by itself, and many of them among the most complex compounds known to modern chemistry. Let me concisely mention these by classes. First, at least three earthy salts-the sulphates of lime, alumina, and potassa. Second, two organic and one simpler acid--acetic (absolute vinegar), meconic (one of the most powerful irritants which can be applied to the intestines through the bile), and sulphuric. All these exist uncombined in the gum, and free to work their will on the mucous tissues.