doses of prussic acid in rose-water. If she had
taken the four doses together she would have
been a dead woman; but she contemptuously
dismissed our inexpert young friend because, she
said, he had been playing with her case, and
sent her only a bottle of rose-water. Probably
the sick public in our friend's neighbourhood,
especially of the richer class, got plenty of
asafœtida and other delicates in their medicine-
bottles for the next few months, and important
people were thrown into ecstasies at being clean
taken off their legs by the extreme filthiness of
our friend's mixtures.

It is really in the medical profession alone
that reform of these old prejudices has begun,
and is being carried on with many a small
incident of personal self-sacrifice. In London and
in our great towns, among the upper and middle
classes, there is a pretty wide-spread knowledge
of the general course of educated opinion and
practice in any matter that concerns the body
of the public; here, therefore, a practitioner of
medicine may thrive the better for being in the
front rank of the army of reform. But the army
of reform is an army of the doctors—doctors
alone are competent to be its leaders—and the
improved opinion by which the wiser of them
thrive is of their own creation. The wealth
and luxury of London also lends itself only too
readily to nice medical experiments in diet. Dr.
Robert Druitt, the medical officer of health to
St. George's, Hanover-square, in a little book
that has set us talking of these things, tells
how small he was made to feel, years ago, when
beginning practice, by a London doctor of the
old school whom he met in consultation over
an important patient. The senior put out his
junior's light by display of a profound knowledge
of cookery and wines. His young friend was an
able man, too; for in those early days of his
career there was not a student of medicine in
whose eyes Dr. Druitt was not honourably
distinguished as the writer of one of the best hand-
books of the anatomy of man. He now
practises physic, is a member of the College of
Physicians, and has distinguished himself in latter
days by liberal action on behalf of public health.
It is such a practitioner—one who has nothing
whatever in common with the race of quacks—
who has been addressing to a medical journal a
series of papers or reports upon the cheap wines
—really wines—that Mr. Gladstone has enabled
all classes to use in diet or as medicine. The
papers have been collected into a small volume,
published by Mr. Renshaw in the Strand. From
that volume we draw some of the main facts
that should be common knowledge now-a-days,
but the little book itself contains so much
explicit and practical information upon the
characters and qualities of the different kinds of
pure and cheap wine now imported from France,
Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Greece, that the
beginner in the use of these wines will deny
himself a great deal of good help if he do not
get the book itself, and use it for his counsellor
till he can find his way about in the newly-
established wine-market, act on his own
knowledge, and satisfy his own taste. For in wine,
as in music and in everything else, even for
good tastes there is a considerable range of
difference. Dr. Druitt is a thoroughly trustworthy
guide as far as he goes. He affects no chemical
profundities, and laughs, as he should, at the
quackeries that recommend wine and even beer
for its phosphorus, iron, or brimstone. He says
that of good wine the stomach is the best test
tube, and accordingly, when the removal of the
prohibitive duties brought in again pure wine at
a cheap price, he determined to go, as
systematically as he could, through all the different
cheap wines brought into the English market—
meaning by cheap, wine that does not cost more
than half-a-crown a bottle—using them naturally
at his dinner-table, and taking note, before its
taste had well gone out of his mouth, of the
qualities of each, with report of its after-effect
upon a constitution rather sensitive.

It need hardly be said that the cheap wines
now coming into common use are not cheap by
reason of inferiority. They are actually superior,
not only as pure wines, but for intrinsic
commercial worth of material, to many ports
and sherries sold at twice their price. We
export raw spirit to re-import a considerable
part of it from Portugal and Hamburg, as port
and other wine. A fifth part of even a good
bottle of port consists of proof spirit, costing at
the rate of about three-farthings a bottle. For
the Portuguese buy the spirit they send back to
us at the rate of two shillings the proof gallon,
taking in one year a million and a half of gallons
of spirit, and sending us back three-and-a-half
million gallons of their wine. In all pure wines
the natural proportion of proof spirit is usually
from eighteen to twenty-two per cent; many
contain eighteen; some reach twenty-five or
even twenty-seven; and, in rare cases, the
proportion of proof spirit may even be thirty per
cent. Port wine that has not been brandied
for the English market, contains twenty-three-
and-a-half per cent. Port wine, as we get it,
contains thirty-five or even forty-five per cent of
spirit, that will only blend in flavour with the
natural wine after the costly process of long
keeping, although one of its uses is to throw
down the fermentable extractive, and give to the
wine at once the appearance, without the flavour,
of "tawny old port." This sort of old port is
usually said to have been long in wood, lest
people should look too curiously at the cork, or
seek in the bottle for the crust of tartaric acid
which is deposited in course of time, and leaves
the wine mellower for its absence. Since the
vine disease, really good ports and sherries have
almost doubled in price; and at prices below
five, six, or seven shillings a bottle, they are
factitious wines, incomparably worse than many
a pure wine of France, Hungary, Austria, or
Greece, of which a choice quality is to be had
for half the money.

For poor hard-working people who lead
indoor lives—teachers, milliners, dressmakers—
to whom even good beer (the best cheap drink
for healthy folks who take active out-door exercise)