IS ALCOHOL A FOOD? 103 



IS ALCOHOL A FOOD? 



CORN and wine were deemed indispensable to man from the re- 

 motest antiquity, just as beef and beer are so considered by the 

 Briton ; and scarcely a people has existed who did not possess a fer- 

 mented liquor of some kind all ascribing to it exalted virtue, such as 

 befits the gift of the gods, as all believed it to be not only from the 

 bodily comfort and invigoration which it imparted, but also from its 

 mysterious effects in the transient madness which it is capable of pro- 

 ducing. Among all nations, consequently, wine, or alcoholic drinks of 

 some sort, has always had its poets or its minstrels ; and, had the an- 

 cients been acquainted with alcohol, or the essential product of fermen- 

 tation as we know it, doubtless they would have made it the symbol of 

 the soul, for which nothing could be more appropriate ; for it is an invis- 

 ible poicery hidden in a grosser body, which it influences in every part, 

 and from which it finally escapes into the " heaven above " gone for- 

 ever ! Nor is that all. The analogy may be extended to the qualities 

 of that image of the soul, which are good and bad united, as in other 

 mystic unions. Had the ancients possessed this knowledge of the 

 distinct yet intimately combining principle, it might have given more 

 significance to their devotion when they poured libations to their 

 gods but how much greater would have been their sense of awe and 

 wonder, had they known what the physiologist knows at the present 

 day ! Let us glance at this truly mysterious agent in action. 



Alcohol is ever ready to enter the animal system. It can be intro- 

 duced under the skin or into a vein. Exalted by heat into the form 

 of vapor, it may be inhaled by man or other animal, when it will pen- 

 etrate into the lungs, will difl'use itself through the bronchial tubes, 

 will pass into the minute ftir-vesicles of the lungs, will travel through 

 the minute circulation with the blood that is going over the air-vesi- 

 cles ta the heart, will condense in that blood, will go direct to the left 

 side of the heart, thence into the arterial canals, and so throughout 

 the entire body. 



Again, when taken in by the more ordinary channel, the stomach, 

 it finds its way by two routes into the circulation. A certain portion 

 of it the greater portion of it is absorbed direct by the veins of 

 the alimentary surface, finds its way straight into the larger veins, 

 which lead up to the heart, and onward with the course of the blood.. 

 Another portion is picked up by small structures proceeding from 

 below the mucous surface of the stomach, and from which originate a 

 series of fine tubes that reach at last the lower portion of a common 

 tube, termed the thoracic duct a tube which ascends in front of the 

 spinal column, and terminates at the junction of two large veins on 

 the left side of the body, at a point where the venous blood, returning. 



