io8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



direction ; so that tlie skin is drier after than before dinner, other 

 things being equal. In like manner, the hands and feet, and the skin 

 generally, become hot and dry after taking alcoholic drinks, and an 

 intoxicated man in a state of perspiration would be an imheard-of 

 phenomenon. 



The direct tendency of alcohol is to diminish muscular power in a 

 state of health, but indirectly it may have the contrary etfect by im- 

 proving the tone of the system through the appetite and digestion of 

 food. In the state of body in which alcohol has reduced muscular 

 contractibility, all the vital actions temporarily languish ; and so far 

 the action of alcohol is opposed to foods, and it is not a food. 



While the food-action of beer and wine may be accounted for by 

 their known nutritive ingredients, other than alcohol, which they con- 

 tain, much difference of opinion exists as to the true action of alcoliol 

 itself, and the problem to be solved is, whether it acts physically or 

 chemicall}^ The known actions of alcohol in man are physical in their 

 character, and so they are upon food immersed in alcohol, or alcohol- 

 and-water, when it is hardened, and the j^rocess of digestion retarded. 



If it has been shown that alcohol is capable of supporting a few 

 persons, it is certain that it kills in its own way ten thousand persons 

 a year in Russia, and fifty thoiTsand in England ; but its method of 

 killing is slow, indirect, and by painful disease. 



Finally, two things must always be borne in mind. First, we use 

 alcohol not on account of its importance as a nutriment, but on ac- 

 count of its effects as a stimulant or relish ; and secondly, the border- 

 line between its use and abuse is so hard to be defined that it becomes 

 a dangerous instrument even in the hands of the strong and wise, a 

 murderous instrument in the hands of the foolish and weak. Food 

 and Fuel Reformer. 



-- 



SKETCH OF DR. H. C. BASTIAK 



PROMINENT among the contemporaneous explorers of biological 

 and physiological science, the investigation of which is so active 

 in the present age, is the subject of this notice, who, though still 

 a young man, has achieved an undoubted eminence in the depart- 

 ments of study to which he has devoted himself. Dr. Bastian has 

 done a good deal of excellent scientific work in the medical field, and 

 has gained the wide respect of the profession ; but he is more gener- 

 ally known by his researches into the origin of life ; and is the author 

 of perhaps the ablest work that has yet appeared on the question of 

 the generation of the lowest animate forms. The careful readers of 

 The Popular Science Monthly are quite aware that the subject of 

 so-called " spontaneous generation " has latterly not only occupied the 



