This amount I divide into three equal doses--one to be administered after each meal. By administering them after meals I give nutrition the start of narcotism, prevent the violent action possessed by stimulants and opiates on the naked stomach, and secure a slower, more uniform distribution of the effects throughout the day. The position of the third dcse after the 6 o'clock meal of the day is particularly counselled by the fact that opium is only secondarily a narcotic, its sedative effects following as a reaction upon its stimulant, and the third dose accordingly begins to act soporifically just about bed-time, when this action is especially required. I keep a glass for each of my patients, upon which their "high-water mark" is indicated by a slip of paper gummed on the outside. When Mr. Edgerton, pursuant to our stipulation, comes to me for his dose, I drop into the glass before his eyes a shot about the size of a small pea--then fill the glass with Magendie's Solution up to the mark indicated. (This shot varies in each case with the rapidity of diminution I think safe to adopt. In some cases it is a buckshot or a small pistol bullet.) Every day a new shot goes in--and if he bears that rate of progress I may even drop one into the glass with each alternate dose. Midway between the doses of morphia I give Mr. E. a powder of bromide of potassium, amounting to 30 or even 40 grains at a time, and an average of about 100 grains per day. The value of this remedy has been a matter of much controversy--some practitioners lauding it to the skies as one of the most powerful agents of control in all disorders of the nervous system, others pronouncing it entirely inert. Where it has proved the latter it has probably been given in too small doses or not persevered in for a sufficient length of time. (The timidity with which it is often prescribed may be seen in the fact that one of the principal druggists on Broadway lately warned a person to whom I had given a prescription for 30 grain doses that he was running a very dangerous risk in taking such a quantity!) Its operation is so entirely different from that of the vegetable narcotics that people looking for their instantaneous sedative effect can not fail to be disappointed. It is very slowly cumulative in its action, seeming to act upon the nervous system by a gradual constitutional change rather thin any special impetus in a given direction. Because that is its _modus operandi_, I begin to give it thus early; and it is of peculiar value now, not only as making the daily diminution of the opium more tolerable, but as preparing the system for the time when the drug is to be abandoned altogether and the hardest part of the tug comes.