The author of this treatise is a really distinguished man in the _jeune médecine_ of France; and it is with a natural interest that we turn somewhat eagerly to the pages of his thesis to discover what are his ideas as to the part which treatment can play in pyrexia. One can hardly do better, in reviewing his work, than select the chapter on the “Indications in Fever,” as a kind of test object, to judge the quality of his work. Judged by this test, it must be pronounced very good. In a quiet and thoughtful manner, M. Ferrand inquires into some of the deepest problems of the physiology and chemistry of fever, and really hits, as it seems to us, most if not all of the principal difficulties which are troubling the minds of the most advanced pathologists and clinical observers in Europe. That he does not pretend to solve all these mysteries is no dispraise to him, but the reverse: at any rate it may be fairly said that he has carefully considered all the doubtful points by the light of the best observations in nearly every European country. If we were inclined to make any exception to his accuracy and completeness of information, it would be on the score of what he says, or rather omits to say, respecting the _rôle_ played by hydro-carbonaceous foods in alimentation. He seems to us to greatly undervalue, if not to ignore, the incalculably important results of recent researches in deciding the rank of non-azotised aliments in _feeding_, and consequently in great part _disarming_, the destructive force of pyrexial combustion. He assigns, as it appears to us, an altogether exaggerated importance to the secondary effects of pyrexia upon the nervous system: while at the same time he appears inadequately impressed with the enormous destructive incidence of febrile action upon the tissues. Upon this point M. Ferrand would surely do well to consult the description of what passes in the organism in pyrexia which was given by Professor Haughton in his admirable address before the British Medical Association at Oxford. He seems to forget, what Professor Haughton therein so ably showed, that a typhus fever or pneumonia patient lying still on his back, and with scarcely anything moving except the organs of vegetative life, and the deep chemistry of the tissues, does in fact a heavier day’s work than any healthy labourer!—heavier, that is, as regards the inevitable destruction of tissue that must go to the maintenance of the most elementary and necessary acts of life, in the absence of the power to assimilate ordinary nutriment. It is this defect (as we think it) in his physiology which makes M. Ferrand’s practical remarks on alcohol so very inferior to those which he makes, in the practical therapeutic portion of his work, upon other agents which he thinks appropriate to the treatment of the febrile state. His account of Todd’s doctrine and school is indeed extremely inadequate, and proves, for the hundredth time, how much that