Is a functional affection of the respiratory organs, frequently depending on constitutional causes, and seldom the result of organic disease. Asthma generally attacks persons of advanced years, and of a weak and lax system; it is, when not hereditary, often the result of sudden changes of temperature, disorder of the digestive organs, or of mental anxiety. An attack of asthma is usually indicated by a sense of constriction or tightness round the chest, a fulness of the stomach, lassitude, drowsiness, and headache. All these symptoms become more urgent towards evening, accompanied with laborious breathing and difficult expiration, attended at the same time with a wheezing noise in the chest and windpipe at every inspiration. As night approaches a hard dry cough succeeds to these symptoms, while the oppressed breathing and sense of suffocation become so acute, as the paroxysm reaches its climax, that the patient is compelled to spring up in bed, or rush to the open window, from fear of instant suffocation. Asthma generally attacks the patient in the night, and most frequently the severity of the fit endures for three or four hours, usually terminating about two in the morning, when, after a free expectoration of frothy mucus, the symptoms gradually subside, and the patient, after much anxiety and suffering, falls asleep. A succession of such paroxysms occur for several consecutive nights, before the symptoms give way and allow the exhausted patient time to recover his strength and tone. _Treatment._—The first endeavour must be directed to shorten the fit and to relieve the most distressing symptoms: the next, to remove the exciting and predisposing causes. Where the patient is strong and not far advanced in life, an emetic, composed of ten grains of ipecacuanha and one grain of tartar emetic, mixed in a cup of warm water, should be given in the first stage of the attack; followed up for some hours by nauseating doses of antimony and squills, as in the following mixture:—Antimonial wine, one ounce; water, four ounces and a half; tincture of squills, three drachms. Mix; and take a table-spoonful every hour so long as the urgency of the symptoms continues. When the attack is slight, and devoid of the marked features of a paroxysm, and the difficulty of breathing and sense of tightness in the chest are the chief symptoms, much benefit will be derived from taking from five to ten drops of hydrocyanic acid in a table-spoonful of water every two hours, for three or four times.