Thirst varies in intensity also according to the nature of the food. If the diet be hot and stimulating, such as results from a free admixture of spices or salt, the desire for drink is greatly increased. The same thing happens if the food be of a dry and solid nature. The purpose of the increased thirst in the former circumstances is manifestly to dilute and diminish the excess of stimulant, and thereby prevent the injury which it would otherwise inflict. The same principle explains the thirst experienced by those who drink too much wine. In instances of this kind I have heard great thirst in the evening and during the night complained of as habitual, without the person even suspecting that it was owing to the wine; and yet, on abstaining from the latter, the thirst very soon disappeared. Continued thirst, it is well known, is much more intolerable than continued hunger. The mass of circulating fluid in the body is very great, and, as the various excretions consist chiefly of fluid matter, it necessarily happens that when these have been eliminated for a considerable time without any liquid being received into the system, the proportion of solid matter in the body becomes unduly large. The blood, consequently, becomes thicker and changed in quality, and much more irritating than it is in its natural state. The craving of thirst is thus generally rendered more urgent and overpowering than that of hunger. In Asiatic Cholera, the watery portion of the blood, on which its fluidity depends, is drained off with frightful rapidity; and the result is, in the first place, an almost complete stoppage of the circulation, and, in the second, a constant craving for drink to supply the place of the lost serum, which consists chiefly of water holding some of the alkaline salts in solution. This circumstance explains in some degree the extraordinary effects which have been produced, even in the worst stages of the disease when life seemed almost extinct, by injecting large quantities of saline solutions into the veins. Patients apparently on the verge of existence, cold, pulseless, and inanimate, have in the course of a few minutes been enabled by this means to sit up in bed, and to exhibit all the signs of restored strength and health. The effect, it is true, was rarely permanent, but for the time it was so wonderful as often to look like restoration from the dead.[12] Fluids taken into the stomach, it is proper to observe, are not subjected to the slow process of digestion, but are absorbed _directly_ into the system; so that, when we take a moderate draught, the whole of it is imbibed from the stomach in a very few minutes. Keeping in view this fact, and the above striking illustration of the influence of the condition of the blood upon the body at large, it becomes easy to conceive why, in a state of exhaustion from abstinence, drink should be more speedily restorative and refreshing than food.