As the body becomes accustomed by habit to bear larger doses of opium than before the habit has been formed, the enormous quantity which some persons have taken are startling and surprising. Dr. Christison, in his work on Poisons, refers to some of these cases. “A female who died of consumption at the age of forty-two, had taken about a dram of solid opium daily for ten years. A well-known literary character, about fifty years of age, has taken laudanum for twenty-five years, with occasional short intermissions, and sometimes an enormous quantity, but enjoys tolerable bodily health. A lady about fifty-five, who enjoys good health, has taken opium many years, and at present uses three ounces of laudanum daily. Lord Mar, after using laudanum for thirty years, at times to the amount of two or three ounces daily, died at the age of fifty-seven, of jaundice and dropsy. A woman who had been in the practice of taking about two ounces of laudanum daily for very many years, died at the age of sixty or upwards. An eminent literary character who died lately, about the age of sixty-three, was in the practice of drinking laudanum to excess from the age of fifteen, and his daily allowance was sometimes a quart of a mixture consisting of three parts laudanum and one of alcohol. A lady now alive, at the age of seventy-four, has taken laudanum in the quantity of half an ounce daily between thirty and forty years. An old woman died not long ago at Leith at the age of eighty, who had taken about half an ounce of laudanum daily for nearly forty years, and enjoyed tolerable health all the time. Visrajee, a celebrated Cutchee chief mentioned by Dr. Burnes, had taken opium largely all his life, and was alive at the age of eighty, with his mind unimpaired.” To these examples we may add the confession of De Quincey: “I, who have taken happiness both in a solid and a liquid shape, both boiled and unboiled, both East Indian and Turkish—who have conducted my experiments upon this interesting subject with a sort of galvanic battery, and have, for the general benefit of the world, inoculated myself, as it were, with the poison of eight thousand drops of laudanum a day—I, it will be admitted, must surely now know what happiness is, if anybody does. Fifty and two years’ experience of opium, as a magical resource under all modes of bodily suffering, I may now claim to have had. According to the modern slang phrase, I had, in the meridian stage of my opium career, used ‘fabulous’ quantities. Stating the quantities—not in solid opium, but in the tincture (known to everybody as laudanum)—my daily ration was eight thousand drops. If you write down that amount in the ordinary way as 8000, you see at a glance that you may read it into eight quantities of a thousand, or into eight hundred quantities of ten; or, lastly, into eighty quantities of one hundred. Now, a single quantity of one hundred will about fill a very old-fashioned obsolete teaspoon,