ALCOHOL.

CHAPTER I.

I.-ALCOHOL, AS ALIMENT.

II.-ALCOHOL, AS AUXILIARY IN RESPIRATION, AND

GENERATOR OF HEAT.

SECTION I.

IT was believed in ancient times that the whole world is composed of but four elements. These are Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Everything that exists in subterranean caverns, or on the surface of the globe-all the creatures of ocean and of ether, living or dead, can, it was imagined, be separated into these elements. According to this doctrine, a plant only differs from a bar of gold in this-that the metal contains a large proportion of earth, and the plant contains a large proportion of air and water. Man also, they believed, a mere compost of three elements, Earth, Air, and Water, animated by celestial fire, the gift of Prometheus. It is hardly necessary to say that modern chemistry has rejected this imaginative dogma of the old philosophers; but, contrary to expectation, she has rejected a simple theory only to introduce one more complex. The chemists of the present day admit the principle, that things as they commonly meet our senses are compound and reducible into more simple elements; but they maintain that these elements, or constituents of matter, are not so few as was believed, that in fact they exceed fifty. Moreover, they add that neither earth, air, fire, nor water, are entitled to rank among these fifty, since they are all (fire excepted, which is not material) compound, and may by chemical art be resolved into their

different ingredients. How! Are not air and water simple bodies? By no means.

Let us transport ourselves in imagination to the interior of a chemical laboratory, and watch the proceedings of yonder disciple of Davy. Observe, he carries in his hand a glass phial, containing water; carefully he arranges his apparatus, his acids, his pneumatic trough; diligently he adjusts his wires. He is about a great undertaking -not, like his Thessalian sisters, to brew a love-philtre, nor like the Northern Valas, to charm the winds to rest. No! It is his to unchain the struggling elements, associated by the edict of nature in the crystal water-dropto set free the aërial prisoners of the wave. His operation is begun. The quiet water-phial begins to obey the spell. It becomes disturbed, agitated. Bubbling gases leap up from its interior. As they rise, they are caught by the chemist, and confined in glass-jars. They remind one of the Diable Boiteux imprisoned by the Spanish magician in a colored bottle. In proportion as the gases escape from the water phial, the level of the water sinks and sinks. At length the last drop of water has exploded into gas, and the phial is empty. Let us examine the results of this operation. The water is all consumed, but beside the chemist stand two glass bottles with glass stoppers. Apparently they are empty, yet in reality they contain the two gases, into which the water has been separated. These gases resemble air in the fact of their invisibility, tastelessness, and imperceptibility to the touch; yet they are not air, as the following properties clearly show. Take the bottle of gas marked A, remove the stopper, and immerse in the gas a smouldering wick. Instantly it bursts into a brilliant flame. Ordinary air would not have this effect upon the wick. If, instead of a wick, a thin iron wire, red hot, be lowered into the bottle A, the wire will immediately begin to burn violently, and sparks from the heated metal will leap through the bottle with a loud crackling noise. None of this would happen had the heated wire been exposed merely to air. Since, therefore, this gas differs from air, let us give it a distinctive name-let us call it oxygen.

In bottle B we have a second invisible, tasteless, impalpable, air-resembling gas. Is this gas also distinct from air? We will see. Remove the stopper, and apply a lighted match to the mouth of the bottle. A terrible explosion occurs. Would any explosion occur were a lighted match

applied to the mouth of a bottle containing only air? Undoubtedly not. This gas therefore being distinct from air, as it is distinct from oxygen, requires a new name.

call it hydrogen.

We will

Let us now review what we have learnt. We have learnt that water is not an element, as the ancients taught, but a compound consisting of two invisible gases, oxygen and hydrogen. We have proved this by extracting these gases from water. We can prove it in another way. If we take the two bottles and mix their contents, and then apply a light to the mixture, the water from which the two gases were originally derived will reappear. Thus we can convert water into oxygen and hydrogen, and, vice versa, oxygen and hydrogen into water. So much for water.

Now for air.

The air is a mixture of gases. It contains a small quantity of oxygen-the same gas that exists in water—and a large quantity of a gas not before mentioned-tasteless, invisible, impalpable, like oxygen and hydrogen, but differing from them in certain properties. Thus if a smouldering match be introduced into a bottle of this new gas, the match will not ignite, as it would if immersed in oxygen, neither will the gas itself explode as would be the case with hydrogen. We must therefore give this new gas a new name-let it be called nitrogen.

All the world know that if wood be exposed to great heat in a covered furnace, so that it cannot burn away, charcoal is produced. Now the Latin name for charcoal is carbon, and chemists always employ the Latin word instead of the English. Everybody also is familiar with sulphur and phosphorus. Now I have stated that modern chemists enumerate more than fifty elements. Among these fifty are oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, (gases) and carbon, sulphur, and phosphorus (solids). Of these fifty elements, all ́sublunary things are composed, animate and inanimate; but a far greater number of the elements enters into the composition of the inanimate than of the animate kingdom. Four elements, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon, constitute the great mass of living substances. Some few other elements, as sulphur and phosphorus, are associated with them in small quantities, but by far the greatest proportion both of animal and vegetable substances consist of the four elements, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon. In this respect man differs nowise from the inferior animals. The

constitution and necessities of his frame are the same. Could a certain amount of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon, with a little sulphur, phosphorus, &c. be collected, there would be present all the material requisite to the composi tion of a man. The "divina particula" alone would be wanting. The process of cremation in use among our forefathers, and still employed by some distant nations, illustrates this fact. The carbon of their burnt heroes left in the funeral pyre a few ashes, devoutly gathered and preserved in urns, while their gaseous parts rose into the atmosphere and mingled with their kindred elements.

It is evident that if the constituent textures of a man are composed of these gases, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen with carbon, a man's food must also consist of these gases with carbon, for out of the food all the textures of the body are formed. Nothing which does not contain these gases can serve as food. It does not however follow that these gases, existing as gases, can serve as food. Indeed a man who should endeavour to supply the place of his ordinary aliment, by gulping gases, with the addition of small quantities of charcoal, would soon experience the insufficiency of such chamelion diet. The three gases with carbon are indispensable as food-they are of themselves sufficient as food-but they require cookery; not coarse, Soyer-cookery, which consists in the application of heat and mere interspersion of condiments, but the delicate cookery of nature, that which in the interior of plants and trees is silently and unceasingly active. In the roots of trees, within the chalices of flowers, and the perianth of grasses, the great operation is conducted. The dew-drop trembling on the petal furnishes oxygen and hydrogen-the wooing zephyr, oxygen and nitrogen. The carbon is derived from a source presently to be explained. With these materials and a sunbeam for their furnace, the invisible cooks commence their cooking. Some time indeed they take to complete it, but by the autumn the work is done. In the broad corn-fields stand millions of little provision-baskets erect on golden haulms-in the green orchards myriads of leafy salvers, with purple fruit, are hanging from the branches. Thus has nature effected her cookery. Thus out of invisible vapors and black ashes has a laborious vegetation concocted delicious nutriment. Still we must not forget that this fruit and this grain owe their nutritive power to the elemental quartett, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon.

If we take flour or pulverised grain, we can by repeated washing separate from it a considerable quantity of starch, of gum, and of sugar. That which remains is called by chemists gluten, and by grocers, when manufactured, macaroni and vermicelli. Now gluten consists of two distinct substances, but they so closely resemble each othertheir properties are so nearly alike-that we may speak of them conjointly. Gluten, I repeat, consists of two substances, fibrine and albumen. Both fibrine and albumen are composed of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon, and contain very nearly the same quantities of each. In addition, they contain a very little sulphur and phosphorus. Thus then gluten-fibrine and albumen-oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, with a little phosphorus and sulphur. Gluten, therefore, is an appropriate aliment, since it contains the elements which enter into the formation of the human body ready cooked or prepared.

It will now be necessary, in order to carry on our argument, to refer more minutely to the elementary composition of the human body. The great bulk of the body, except the bones, consists of flesh or muscle; and it so happens that when the composition of flesh is investigated chemically, it is found that fibrine and albumen form by far the greater part. Fibrine and albumen! Why fibrine and albumen form gluten, the principal ingredient of flour-of bread. Another large portion of the body-a very large portionis blood. But blood, like muscle, consists principally of fibrine and albumen; nay, its resemblance to muscle is such that it has been termed by a French writer," chair coulante" -liquid flesh, or fluid muscle. Now all the tissues of the body, muscle, brain, liver, kidneys, &c. are formed from the blood, that is to say, from fibrine and albumen. It is therefore necessary that the blood should draw from the food a perennial supply of fibrine and albumen to be expended upon the tissues, for the blood has in itself no power of forming fibrine and albumen, nor of converting into fibrine and albumen other substances, even although these substances may contain all the elements of fibrine and albumen, viz., oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon, with a minute quantity of sulphur and phosphorus. The food, I say, must contain fibrine and albumen, that it may render them to the blood, which again will give them up to the tissues. It is thus that the tissues increase in bulk and vigor. What therefore is the essential condition of all food ?