Mr. Parton of course asserts that alcoholic drinks do not nourish the body, and denies to them the title of foods. He begins by quoting Liebig's assertion "that as much flour or meal as can lie on the point of a table-knife is more nutritious than nine quarts of the best Bavarian beer." Whereupon the reader, who is perhaps not familiar with the history of physiological controversy, thinks at once that Liebig's great authority is opposed to the opinion that alcohol is food. Nothing could be further from the truth. Perhaps nothing in Mr. Parton's book shows more forcibly the danger of "cramming" a subject instead of studying it. When Liebig wrote the above sentence, he believed that foods might be sharply divided into two classes,--those which nourish, and those which keep up the heat of the body. He believed that no foods except those which contain nitrogen can nourish the tissues; and he therefore excluded not only alcohol, _but fat, starch and sugar also_, from the class of nutritious substances. But Liebig was far from believing that alcohol is not food. On the contrary he distinctly classed it with fat, starch and sugar, as a _heat-producing food_,--a fact which Mr. Parton, if he knows it, takes good care not to quote! But this twofold classification of foods has for several years been known to be unsound. It has been shown that all true foods are more or less nutritious, and that all are more or less heat-producing. Starch and sugar have maintained their places in the class of nutritive materials from which Liebig tried to exclude them, and we have now to see whether the same can be said of the closely kindred substance, alcohol. Mr. Parton thinks he has proved that alcohol cannot be food, when he has asserted that it is not chemically transformed within the body. As soon as it is taken, he tells us, lungs, skin and kidneys all set busily to work to expel it, and they send it out just as it came in: _therefore_ it is an enemy. Now all this may be said of water. Water is not chemically changed within the body; as soon as we drink it, lungs, skin and kidneys begin busily to expel it; and it goes out just as good water as it came in. Nevertheless, water is one of the most essential elements of nutrition.