Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/616

596 beliefs with the reality of fact, "He shall exchange things for words, reason for insanity, the world for a fable, and shall be unable to interpret."

To meet difficulties connected with the intricacies and complexities of the problem, the method of physiology is clearly to reduce the equations to their simplest possible terms. By studying the physiology of alcohol in a number of simpler organisms, sufficient light may be thrown on the human experiment to render its interpretation possible. A unicellular organism is millions times less complicated than a human body; still, fundamental activities, nutrition, excretion, growth, reproduction, appear similar in both. So, too, the lower animals are proportionally simpler and also approach man physiologically more closely for purposes of comparison. Their conditions of life, too, can be made far more nearly comparable than it would be possible to either find or procure with men. With man, even after death, the microscopical study of the tissues to demonstrate the influence of alcohol upon them is so complicated by conditions of disease and post-mortem changes that no wholly trustworthy evidence is obtainable. On the other hand, animals may be killed in known conditions of health, and their tissues immediately prepared for examination; and in this way results have already been obtained by Berkley, Dehio, Stewart, and others, which have materially assisted in the interpretation of uncertain findings in human material.

Such a series of experiments should clearly be made on a number of different organisms, both plants and animals, in order that our basis for comparison and judgment may be sufficiently broad to enable us to distinguish between the constant and general effects of alcohol from those which are accidental or exceptional. And observations should be continued long enough to bring out clearly any more remote effects, especially those relating to heredity, of great importance, and about which much has been said but practically nothing is known.

It is intended in the following to outline the results of three series of experiments. Although necessarily incomplete in many ways, they may serve to demonstrate methods of research, and to show some of the possibilities of further work.

—The yeast plant, when sown in a nutrient solution, discloses an almost