time diffused, and in those parts where there is a large percentage of
water, it remains longer than in other parts. From some organs which
have an open tube for conveying fluids away, as the liver and kidneys,
it is thrown out or eliminated, and in this way a portion of it is
ultimately removed from the body. The rest passing round and round with
the circulation, is probably decomposed and carried off in new forms of
matter.

"When we know the course which the alcohol takes in its passage through
the body, from the period of its absorption to that of its elimination,
we are the better able to judge what physical changes it induces in the
different organs and structures with which it comes in contact. It
first reaches the blood; but, as a rule, the quantity of it that enters
is insufficient to produce any material effect on that fluid. If,
however, the dose taken be poisonous or semi-poisonous, then even the
blood, rich as it is in water--and it contains seven hundred and ninety
parts in a thousand--is affected. The alcohol is diffused through this
water, and there it comes in contact with the other constituent parts,
with the fibrine, that plastic substance which, when blood is drawn,
clots and coagulates, and which is present in the proportion of from two
to three parts in a thousand; with the albumen which exists in the
proportion of seventy parts; with the salts which yield about ten parts;
with the fatty matters; and lastly, with those minute, round bodies
which float in myriads in the blood (which were discovered by the Dutch
philosopher, Leuwenhock, as one of the first results of microscopical
observation, about the middle of the seventeenth century), and which are
called the blood globules or corpuscles. These last-named bodies are, in
fact, cells; their discs, when natural, have a smooth outline, they are
depressed in the centre, and they are red in color; the color of the
blood being derived from them. We have discovered in recent years that