a preparation is practically free from albumin, gelatin and fat; all the nutritive principles except the saline matter having been extracted.  Liebig states that 34 pounds of meat are required to produce 1 pound of extract.  In 1872, he wrote “neither tea nor extract of meat are nutritive in the ordinary sense,” and he went on to speak of their medicinal properties.  Druit, in 1861, in describing the effect of a liquid preparation of meat, states that it exerted a rapid and stimulating action on the brain, and he proposed it as an auxiliary and partial substitute for brandy, in all case of great exhaustion or weakness attended with cerebral depression or despondency.  In like manner, a feast of animal food in savages, whose customary diet was almost exclusively vegetable, has been described by travellers as producing great excitement and stimulation similar to that of intoxicating spirits.  Similar effects have been observed from a copious employment of Liebig’s extract.  Voit asserts, from the results of his experiments, that extract of meat is practically useless as a food, and other authorities are quite of the same opinion, although they may value it as a stimulant and drug. The Extra Pharmacopaeia, 1901, states that “Liebig’s Extract or Lemco consists of creatin, creatinin, globulin and urea, with organic potash and other salts.  It has been much over-estimated as a food either for invalids or healthy persons; still it is often valuable as a flavouring to add to soups, beef-tea, etc., and it is a nerve food allied to tea.”  Meat extracts stimulate the action of the heart and the digestive processes, but as in the case of other stimulants there is a succeeding period of depression.  The British Medical Journal says that the widespread belief in the universal suitability of concentrated beef-tea is frequently responsible for increasing the patient’s discomfort, and is even capable in conditions of kidney inefficiency, of producing positive harm.  Some of the meat bases, the leucomaines, have been found to possess marked poisonous effects on the body.  The manfacturers of meat extracts continue to mislead the public by absurdly false statements of the value of their products.  They assert that their extracts contain the nutritive matter of 30, 40 or 50 times their weight of fresh meat, or that one or two meat-lozenges are sufficient for a meal.  One company, asserts by direct statement, or imply by pictorial advertisement, that the nutritive matter in an ox can be concentrated into the bulk of a bottle of extract; and another company that a tea-cup full is equivalent in food value to an ox.  Professor Halliburton writes:  “Instead of an ox in a tea-cup, the ox’s urine in a tea-cup would be much nearer the fact, for the meat extract consists largely of products on the way to urea, which more nearly resemble in constitution the urine than they do the flesh of the ox.”  Professor Robert Bartholow has also stated that the chemical