at night is most efficient. If this is considered too coarse an article for food, the doctor may prescribe squill (one of the same tribe) as physic. I prefer the former. Water-cress, garden-cress, and mustard, in salads, asparagus and the girasole, all act as tonics on the kidneys. Potatoes should be entirely abandoned.

Such are the means the patient may use for himself; but medicine furnishes many more.

This simple inordinate flow of urine which I have described, and which is so readily remedied, often if neglected, issues in, if it does not sometimes begin with something more serious. The urine may be loaded with albumen, Bright's disease; or with sugar, diabetes; phosphates, salts which produce irritable bladder and stone; oxalic acid, oxaluria. Let us take first,

ALBUMINOUS URINE.

Albumen enters into the natural constitution of most of the tissues and organs. While all the processes are healthy, it is transformed into urea, and is thus removed in the urine. When it escapes as albumen through the kidneys, there is

much that is wrong in the system, and serious disease will manifest itself somewhere.

This escape of albumen is seldom observed at its commencement. The redundant flow of urine not being attended with suffering, merely with inconvenience, is allowed to proceed unchecked until much debility is felt, and often until the feet begin to swell. Then the Physician is called in; and if he examines the urine, the mischief is discovered. The way to find albumen is to boil a portion of the urine in a glass tube, or silver spoon, when flakes of coagulated albumen appear. To detect minute quantities, a few drops of nitric acid are added to the urine before boiling.

An aged person passing too much water, and feeling himself growing rapidly weak, may test the urine for himself.

The late Dr. Bright gained great celebrity by examining the kidneys in cases which had proved fatal: he found these organs palpably diseased. The change in the structure of the kidneys was regarded as the cause; they are said to be degenerated; and the complaint is now known as "Bright's disease."

Now, there is no doubt that the alteration in the kidneys is one effect of a general change in the albumen in many or all parts of the body. It is the soluble albumen pervading the lungs, muscles, and tissues generally, which is undergoing a change,—degradation,—an abnormal change, instead of passing into urea. This is proved, first, by the general debility which accompanies the escape of albumen; secondly, by the effusion of water into the tissues—that is, dropsy, its immediate consequence; thirdly, by the nature and action of a remarkable remedy recently discovered.

If, when the outflow of albumen is first detected, there are no serious changes already advanced in any important organ, the disease is amenable to a decided but simple course of diet, which is the remedy alluded to.

Hence the importance of attention to the urine if it be habitually redundant, and the simple means described above have been used, and fail to check it.

A happy thought occurred to a German Physician, when reflecting on the subject of certain

incurable diseases. He conjectured that a great and beneficial change might be wrought in the constitution by complete abstinence from every article of food usually taken by adults, and returning to that on which alone the rapidly-growing body in infancy is fed. He tried it in a variety of cases; and, to his own surprise, he found it strikingly successful in albumenuria, or Bright's disease, in all its stages, even in some where it had brought on dropsy.

This remedy consists in living for a time exclusively on milk; and it has been adopted, with marvellous success, in this country. Pure milk, with the butter, that is, the cream carefully removed,-skimmed milk, in fact. This method of treatment has been called the "milk cure." It has nothing of charlatanry about it. Its action is explicable on the principles of the soundest science. It accords with physiology. Human milk contains very little fatty matter; and skimmed cow's milk closely resembles it. The effect of this returning to the simple nourishment of childhood strikingly and beautifully illustrates the chemistry of the living body.

As Bright's disease is one which certainly and rapidly proves fatal under ordinary circumstances, and, indeed, the idea of its being a hopeless disease in the kidneys tends to its being usually treated only by palliatives, it becomes of great importance, now that an efficacious remedy has been discovered, that it should be used properly, and under skilled superveillance.

MUDDY URINE AND GRAVEL-ORIGIN AND
PREVENTION OF STONE.

In a state of health the urine is a clear transparent fluid, of a straw-colour when passed, and remains so for some time. In many disorders of the system it becomes turbid on cooling, with more or less sediment, with various tints of colour, yellowish or reddish brown.

Now a very important distinction exists, and in elderly persons the due appreciation of it may very often greatly influence the duration of life.

If the sediment and the turbidity disappear, and the urine becomes clear on heating it gently, whilst it indicates febrile or inflammatory action somewhere