19.  “Bitters."—­There are other liquids not called “drinks” which contain alcohol.  “Bitters” usually contain more alcohol than is found in ale or wine, and sometimes more than in the strongest whiskey.  “Jamaica ginger” is almost pure alcohol.  Hence, it is often as harmful for a person to use these medicines freely as to use alcoholic liquors in any other form.

20. Alcoholic liquors of all kinds are often adulterated.  That is, they contain other poisons besides alcohol.  In consequence of this, they may become even more harmful than when pure; but this does not make it safe to use even pure liquor.  Alcohol is itself more harmful than the other drugs usually added in adulteration.  It is important that you should know this, for many people think they will not suffer much harm from the use of alcohol if they are careful to obtain pure liquors.

21.  Some Experiments.—­How many of you remember what you have learned in previous lessons about the poisonous effects of alcohol?  Do people ever die at once from its effects?  Only a short time ago a man made a bet that he could take five drinks of whiskey in five seconds.  He dropped dead when he had swallowed the fourth glass.  No one ever suffered such an effect from taking water or milk or any other good food or drink.

22. A man once made an experiment by mistake.  He was carrying some alcohol across a lawn.  He accidentally spilled some upon the grass.  The next day he found the grass as dead and brown as though it had been scorched by fire.

23. Mr. Darwin, the great naturalist, once made a curious experiment.  He took a little plant with three healthy green leaves, and shut it up under a glass jar where there was a tea-spoonful of alcohol.  The alcohol was in a dish by itself, so it did not touch the plant; but the vapor of the alcohol mixed with the air in the jar so that the plant had to breathe it.  In less than half an hour he took the plant out.  Its leaves were faded and somewhat shrivelled.  The next morning it appeared to be dead.  Do you suppose the odor of milk or meat, or of any good food, would affect a plant like that?  Animals shut up with alcohol die in just the same way.

24.  A Drunken Plant.—­How many of you remember about a curious plant that catches flies?  Do you remember its name?  What does the Venus’s fly-trap do with the flies after it catches them?  Do you say that it eats them?  Really this is what it does, for it dissolves and absorbs them.  In other words, it digests them.  This is just what our stomachs do to the food we eat.

25. A few years ago Mr. Darwin thought that he would see what effect alcohol would have upon the digestion of a plant.  So he put a fly-catching plant in a jar with some alcohol for just five minutes.  The alcohol did not touch the plant, because the jar was only wet with the alcohol on the inside.  When he took the plant out, he found that it could not catch flies, and that its digestion was spoiled so that it could not even digest very tender bits of meat which were placed on its leaves.  The plant was drunk.