596 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



beliefs with tlie reality of fact, " He shall exchange things for 

 words, reason for insanity, the world for a fable, and shall be 

 unable to interpret." 



To meet difficulties connected with the intricacies and com- 

 plexities of the problem, the method of physiology is clearly to 

 reduce the equations to their simplest possible terms. By study- 

 ing the physiology of alcohol in a number of simpler organisms, 

 sufiBcient light may be thrown on the human experiment to ren- 

 der its interpretation possible. A unicellular organism is mil- 

 lions times less complicated than a human body ; still, fundamental 

 activities, nutrition, excretion, growth, reproduction, appear simi- 

 lar in both. So, too, the lower animals are proportionally simpler 

 and also approach man physiologically more closely for purposes 

 of comparison. Their conditions of life, too, can be made far 

 more nearly comparable than it would be possible to either find 

 or procure with men. With man, even after death, the micro- 

 scopical study of the tissues to demonstrate the influence of alco- 

 hol upon them is so complicated by conditions of disease and 

 post-mortem changes that no wholly trustworthy evidence is 

 obtainable.* On the other hand, animals may be killed in known 

 conditions of health, and their tissues immediately prepared for 

 examination ; and in this way results have already been obtained 

 by Berkley,! Dehio, X Stewart,* and others, which have materially 

 assisted in the interpretation of uncertain findings in human 

 material. 



Such a series of experiments should clearly be made on a 

 number of different organisms, both plants and animals, in order 

 that our basis for comparison and judgment may be sufificiently 

 broad to enable us to distinguish between the constant and gen- 

 eral effects of alcohol from those which are accidental or excep- 

 tional. And observations should be continued long enough to 

 bring out clearly any more remote effects, especially those relating 

 to heredity, of great importance, and about which much has been 

 said but practically nothing is known. 



It is intended in the following to outline the results of three 

 series of experiments. Although necessarily incomplete in many 

 ways, they may serve to demonstrate methods of research, and to 

 show some of the possibilities of further work. 



I. Experiments upon the Growth of Yeast. The yeast 

 plant, when sown in a nutrient solution, discloses an almost 



* Berkley, H. J. The Effects of Alcohol on the Central Nervous System. Quarterly 

 Journal of Inebriety, 1896, p. 109. 



f Ibid. Studies on the Lesions produced by the Action of Certain Poisons on the 

 Cortical Nerve Cell. I. Alcohol. Brain, 1895, p. 473. 



X Dehio, H. Centralblatt fiir Nervenheilkunde und Psychiatric, 1895. 



* Stewart, C. C. Journal of Experimental Medicine, 1896. 



