"I have just read your quotations from the Abbe Moigno, and your own comments thereon. I have tried experiments very similar to those you describe, with exactly the same results; in fact, so far as intellectual work is concerned, I might describe my own experience by direct plagiarism of your words.

Besides these, I have tried other experiments which may be interesting to those who, without any partizan fanaticism, are seeking for practical guidance on this subject.

As many of your readers may know, I have been (when of smaller girth) an energetic pedestrian, have walked over a large part of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, crossed France twice on foot, done Switzerland and the Tyrol pretty exhaustively; in one walk from Paris taking in on the way the popular lions of the Alps, and then proceeding, via, Milan and Genoa, to Florence, Rome, Naples, and Calabria, then from Messina to Syracuse, and on to the East. All this, excepting the East, on foot. At another time from Venice to Milan, besides a multitude of minor tours, and my well-known walk through Norway.

In the course of these, my usual average rate, when in fair training, was 200 miles per week. The alcohol experiments consisted in doing a fortnight at this rate on water, scrupulously abstaining from any alcoholic drink whatever, and then a fortnight using the beverages of the country in ordinary moderate quantity. I have thus used British ales and porter, Bavarian beer, French wines, Italian wines, Hungarian wine in the Tyrol, Christiania ol, &c., according to circumstances, and the result has been the same, 'or with very little variation. With the stimulant I have, of course, obtained a temporary exhilaration that was pleasant enough while it lasted, but after the first week I found myself dragging through the last few miles, and quite able to appreciate the common habit of halting at a roadside "pub." or wine-shop, for a drink on the way. No such inclination came upon me when my only beverage was water, or water plus a cup of coffee for breakfast only (no afternoon tea). Then I came in fresh, usually finishing at the best pace of the day, enjoying the brisk exercise in cool evening air. Physical work of this kind admits of accurate measurement, and I was careful to equalise the average of these experimental comparative fortnights.

The result is a firm conviction that the only beverage for obtaining the maximum work out of any piece of human machinery is water, as pure as possible; that all other beverages (including even tea and coffee), ginger-beer, and all such concoctions as the so-called "temperance drinks," are prejudicial to anybody not under medical treatment. To a sound-bodied man there is no danger in drinking any quantity of cold water in the hottest weather, provided it is swallowed slowly. I have drunk as much as a dozen quarts in the course of a stiff mountain climb when perspiring profusely, and never suffered the slightest inconvenience, but, on the contrary, have found that the perspiration promoted by frequent and copious libations at the mountain streams enabled me to vigorously enjoy the roasting beat of sun-rays striking so freely and fiercely as they do through the thin air on the southward slopes of a high mountain.

I am not a teetotaler, and enjoy a glass of light wine, but always take it as I sucked lollypops when a child, not because "it is good for my complaint," or any such humbug, but simply because I am so low in the scale of creation, as imperfect, as far from angelic, as to be capable of occasionally enjoying a certain amount of purely sensual indulgence, and of doing so from nothing higher than purely sensual motives.

If all would admit this, and freely confess that their drinking or smoking, however moderate, is simply a folly or a vice, they would be far less liable to go to excess than when they befool themselves by inventing excuses that cover their weaknesses with a flimsy disguise of medicinal necessity, or other pretended advantage. In all such cases the physical mischief of the alcohol is supplemented by the moral corruption of habitual hypocrisy."

Knowledge, August 18, 1882.