Waste, we may be told, is life, and the rapidity of change marks the
activity of the vital processes. True, if each particle consumed is at
once and adequately replaced. Beyond that point, let the balance once
tend to over-consumption, and we approach the confines of decay. Birds
live more and faster than men, and insects probably most of all; yet
many of the latter are ephemeral.

Every-day experience had long pointed to the recurring coincidence,
that, of the annual victims of pulmonary consumption, few were to be
found among the habitual consumers of ardent spirits. Science
volunteered the explanation, that alcohol supplied a hydro-carbonaceous
nutriment similar to that furnished by the cod-liver oil, which,
serving as fuel, spared the wasting of the tissues, just in proportion
to its own consumption and assimilation. Other aid it was supposed to
lend, by stimulating the function of nutrition to renewed energy. Later
investigations have proved that it exercises a yet more important
influence as an arrester of metamorphosis. It was on arriving at this
conclusion, that Dr. Böcker was led to institute a series of careful
experiments to determine the influence of water on the physical
economy, and the real value of salt, sugar, coffee, tea, and other
condiments, as articles of food. "The experimenter appears to have used
the utmost precision, and details so conscientiously the mode adopted
of making his estimates, that additional knowledge may perhaps alter
the conclusions drawn, but can never diminish the value of the
experiments." They are not open to the objections of mistaken
sensations, and honest, though ludicrous, misapprehension of fallible
symptoms, to which the testing of drugs homeopathically is liable, and
of which another instance has just occurred in London, in the "proving"
of the new medicinal agent, gonoine. They rather resemble in accuracy a
quantitative, as well as a qualitative, analysis. We will cite first