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at the same time, an examination of its phenomena explains satisfactorily the regimen and diet which has been found, by experience, most suitable to the diabetic patient. I shall illustrate the disease by a case which was placed under my control by Dr. Stokes some years ago.

A young man (æt. 20) named Murphy suffered from fever (enteric ?) in November, 1859, and on recovering became diabetic; he was admitted into the Meath Hospital in October, 1860, where he remained under my observation until his death, on the 12th January, 1861.

He was allowed, for nine weeks, to eat as much as he liked of certain kinds of food, which were varied, week by week, to suit his wants, my object being to obtain, if possible, the natural constants of the disease, undisturbed by external interference; the only medicine used by Dr. Stokes's order being opium, to produce sleep, and a little creosote occasionally, to promote digestion. As the details of this experiment have been fully published, I shall confine myself to the final results. His food and excretions were analyzed from week to week, so as to determine the total quantities of sugar-forming and urea-producing food, as well as the sugar and urea actually excreted.

During six of the nine weeks, the sugar excreted was in excess of the sugar ingested; and the means of the whole nine weeks' daily excretion and ingestion of sugar were—

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During two of the nine weeks of observation, the urea excreted was in excess of the urea ingested; and the means of the whole nine weeks' daily excretion and ingestion of urea were—

Urea excreted

Urea ingested....

Grains.

1,182

1,349

The foregoing facts illustrate strikingly one of the prominent symptoms of diabetes, viz, the canine appetite; the quantity both of sugar-producing and urea-forming food consumed is more than double what is necessary to maintain a vigorous laborer in perfect health. An examination of the excretions explains the other prominent symptom of diabetes, viz, the complete prostration of strength in the patient, notwithstanding the great amount of food consumed.

In a state of health, food produces three excretions only, viz, urea, carbonic acid, and water; in diabetes, the farinaceous foods appear in the excretions as sugar, and not as carbonic acid and water; and the work necessary to maintain animal heat must be provided altogether at the expense of flesh food, which is the very form of food least fitted to maintain it.

The diabetic patient resembles a racing steamboat on the Mississippi whose supply of coals is exhausted, and whose cargo furnishes nothing better than lean pork hams to throw into the furnace to maintain the race. It cannot be wondered at that our poor patient, under such disadvantageous conditions, fails to keep in the front.

Let us compare together the minimum of work necessary to keep Owen Murphy alive, with the work actually supplied to him by the food digested.

1. I have already stated that Dr. Ranke found 660 grams of carbonic acid excreted daily, in the extreme fasting condition, when he weighed 67 kilograms. Now, since

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we find 69 grains per pound of body weight as the minimum excretion of carbonic acid consistent with continued life.

This quantity of carbonic acid represents a work generated by its production that would lift its corresponding pound of body weight through a height of

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Under ordinary conditions, the greater part of this carbonic acid and work is produced by the digestion of farinaceous food; but since, as we have seen, the farinaceous food is excreted as sugar in the diabetic patient, and, therefore, does no work at all, the whole of the foregoing work must be done by the digestion of other kinds of food.

I have already shown that it follows, from Lavoisier's experiments, (confirmed in a remarkable manner by those of Regnault,) that the work done by the combustion of carbon in the body is to the work done by the combustion of hydrogen in the proportion of 9068 to 3024, almost exactly 3 to 1; hence we have the work done by Owen Murphy, as a minimum in health

Due to carbon

Due to hydrogen

Miles.

5.716

1.905

7.621

This result is somewhat in excess of the truth, for the same reason that the calculated digestion coefficient of proteine is in excess of that found by Frankland from experiment; for the combustion coefficients of carbon and hydrogen in organic compounds are slightly less than when free. If we are permitted to reduce 7.621 miles in the same proportion as in the digestion of proteine, viz, 48 to 43, we shall find

Owen Murphy minimum of work consists of body weight lifted through 6.83 miles.

Let us now compare this minimum with the work actually performed

by him when suffering from diabetes, by the digestion of flesh food and production of urea.

2. I have already shown that the work produced by the formation of 501.28 grains of urea is 704 foot-tons by calculation from the composition of proteine and urea. This result should be reduced in the proportion of 48375 to 43155, in order to obtain the work given by Professor Frankland's experiments. Making this reduction, we find that 500 grains of urea correspond to 626.3 foot-tons of work, or 100 grains urea to 125.26 foot-tons; or, in other words, every four grains of urea excreted correspond to five tons lifted through one foot.

Owen Murphy excreted, on an average, 1,182 grains of urea daily during nine weeks, which, by the foregoing rule, are equal to—

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where a represents in miles the height through which the patient could be lifted by the work done per day, and is equal to—

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This result is almost exactly equal to that already found as the minimum consistent with continued life, and explains in the most satisfactory manner the complete prostration of the patient, notwithstanding the consumption and digestion of more than double the usual quantity of flesh food.

In corroboration of the foregoing conclusion, I may mention that Murphy's temperature was found to be constantly 2° F. below that of other patients (chronic) placed in the same ward, and, in other respects, under similar conditions.

His unfavorable symptoms (so long as his powers of digestion were not impaired) were invariably alleviated by the free use of flesh food and fat, the latter being instinctively preferred by him; so much so, that during the delirium that preceded his death for twenty-four hours, he raved incessantly about "fat, roasted fat, which the angels of heaven were preparing for him."

I have studied many other cases of diabetes mellitus, and found similar results in all; but I feel it to be unnecessary to describe them, as one well-ascertained train of phenomena, carefully observed and recorded, is quite sufficient to establish the order of nature.

CONCLUSION.

I have, now, Mr. President and gentlemen, to apologize for the length of time during which I have spoken, and to thank you for the patience with which you have listened to me. I am well aware how much I am indebted to your kindness, for I labored under two serious disadvantages in addressing you-in the first place, I had undertaken a task beyond my strength; and again, my address is made shortly after you had, like myself, been charmed and instructed by the luminous, learned, and

eloquent oration of Professor Rolleston. I felt confident, however, that I possessed one advantage that he did not; I was a stranger in Oxford, and believed that my faults in matter and style would be leniently criticised; in this expectation, I am happy to say I am not disappointed; and again I thank you for your kindness. Two other advantages I share with him, which have contributed to his address as much as to my own— a profound respect and reverence for all honest laborers in search of truth, whether they have preceded us by twenty years or by two thousand years; and an unwavering confidence and faith in the future that lies before the science of medicine. We traverse a sea mapped with imperfect charts, but assured of a safe guide in our compass and stars; but we cannot afford to neglect a single rock or shoal, buoyed for us by the skill and care of those that have preceded us. Let us follow their example, and mark with conscientious care, for our successors, the dan gers we ourselves discover and escape.

Assembled, as we are, within the halls of the University of Oxford, the center and heart of all that is intellectual and religious in the life of England-a university that borrows its accurate logic, as well as its refined ethics, from the lips of Aristotle; that reverences Euclid as the fountain and source of its elegant geometry; and sits at the feet of Homer, Pindar, and Eschylus, to learn its poetry-we need not fear that Hippocrates and Galen will ever want admirers and students; but the Oxford of to-day has taught us, what many did not anticipate, that she is equally ready and skillful, as she has proved herself to be in cultivating literature, to devote her vast intellectual energies to the encouragement and development of the natural sciences, based upon the solid and only permanent foundation of mathematical research. The efforts made within the last few years by Oxford to encourage within her walls the mathematical and natural sciences, have won for her the respect, and warmed toward her the hearts, of all that search for truth in the study of nature. Our brothers in Oxford, like the Athenians at Syracuse, have gone on board the fleet, while we watch them from the shore, sympathizing in the sea-fight; as they win, we shout; when they fail,

we weep.

Long may the union of the far distant, but never to be forgotten, past, with the living present, that now exists in Oxford, continue. No science, no profession, can benefit so much by it as that of medicine.

HYDROGEN AS A GAS AND AS A METAL.

BY DR. J. EMERSON REYNOLDS.

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Notes of a lecture delivered in the theater of the Royal Dublin Society.

When the programme of this course of lectures was published, it became evident that the subject of the present one was, by a singular coincidence, closely connected with that of two of the earlier lectures of the series. I refer to the discourse of Mr. Stoney on "Meteoric Showers," " and of Professor Ball on "Nebulæ." In the latter lecture, we learned that many of the thin mists observable in the heavens are not star clusters, as they were long supposed to be, but are enormous masses of gaseous matter in a state of intense ignition. The examination of the light emitted by these nebulæ enables us to state with certainty that at least one elementary body well known upon this earth is present in all of them as a principal constituent, and that element is one which chemists call hydrogen. In Mr. Stoney's lecture on "Meteoric Showers," he pointed out that some of these strange visitors to our globe, the meteoric stones, are found to contain pent up within them a certain gas, which gas has been shown by analysis to be hydrogen. We find, then, this hydrogen in enormous quantities throughout space, and at so great a distance from our planet that the human mind is unable to appreciate the interval which separates us from even the nearest of those mighty gaseous oceans. Again, we find this hydrogen carried to our planet by those strange wanderers of interstellar space, the meteors. And, finally, we have it on this earth, not in the free state, it is true, but as an essential constituent of one of the most important components of this globe, viz, water.

Our object in this lecture, then, is to study this remarkable element, hydrogen, as we meet with it here, to determine some of its chief prop erties, and to ascertain its nature.

It has been already said that our chief storehouse of hydrogen on this earth is water, but we find it in many other well-known bodies; for instance, in the dreaded "fire-damp" of our coal mines we have the hydrogen combined with another element, carbon. Again, common coalgas contains a large proportion of hydrogen; and I have only to mention that this same body is an essential constituent of the bread we eat, the sugar we mix with our tea, the clothes we wear, of our flesh and blood too, in order to show that this is one of the most widely diffused of that class of bodies known to chemists as elementary forms of matter. But though we find hydrogen in all the substances mentioned just

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