OTHER ORGANS INVOLVED.

“By common observation, the flush seen on the cheek during the first stage of alcoholic excitation, is presumed to extend merely to the parts actually exposed to view.  It cannot, however, be too forcibly impressed that the condition is universal in the body.  If the lungs could be seen, they, too, would be found with their vessels injected; if the brain and spinal cord could be laid open to view, they would be discovered in the same condition; if the stomach, the liver, the spleen, the kidneys or any other vascular organs or parts could be exposed, the vascular engorgement would be equally manifest.  In the lower animals, I have been able to witness this extreme vascular condition in the lungs, and there are here presented to you two drawings from nature, showing, one the lungs in a natural state of an animal killed by a sudden blow, the other the lungs of an animal killed equally suddenly, but at a time when it was under the influence of alcohol.  You will see, as if you were looking at the structures themselves, how different they are in respect to the blood which they contained, how intensely charged with blood is the lung in which the vessels had been paralyzed by the alcoholic Spirit.”

EFFECT ON THE BRAIN.

“I once had the unusual, though unhappy, opportunity of observing the same phenomenon in the brain structure of a man, who, in a paroxysm of alcoholic excitement, decapitated himself under the wheel of a railway carriage, and whose brain was instantaneously evolved from the skull by the crash.  The brain itself, entire, was before me within three minutes after the death.  It exhaled the odor of spirit most distinctly, and its membranes and minute structures were vascular in the extreme.  It looked as if it had been recently injected with vermilion.  The white matter of the cerebrum, studded with red points, could scarcely be distinguished, when it was incised, by its natural whiteness; and the pia-mater, or internal vascular membrane covering the brain, resembled a delicate web of coagulated red blood, so tensely were its fine vessels engorged.

“I should add that this condition extended through both the larger and the smaller brain, the cerebrum and cerebellum, but was not so marked in the medulla or commencing portion of the spinal cord.”

THE SPINAL CORD AND NERVES.

“The action of alcohol continued beyond the first stage, the function of the spinal cord is influenced.  Through this part of the nervous system we are accustomed, in health, to perform automatic acts of a mechanical kind, which proceed systematically even when we are thinking or speaking on other subjects.  Thus a skilled workman will continue his mechanical work perfectly, while his mind is bent on some other subject; and thus we all perform various acts in a purely automatic