I have had some small experience of the value of one of these under exceptional circumstances. When reading some years ago in Paris, under pressure of time, for public viva voce medical examinations I found that I could work for from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, for three or four weeks together (work ending in successful examinations), without mental or physical fatigue, or bad after-results if I took a small daily dose of coca wine. My modicum was a bottle a week, discontinued immediately my task was done. Recently, when making a long convalescence from influenza, in which depressing cardiac symptoms were marked, I found again in coca a good and reliable restorative. I have no reluctance in saying that, if I had to accomplish some severe work which drew exhaustingly on my full mental and physical powers - such as preparing in a short time for a public scientific examination in a foreign language, doing literary work under pressure, or nursing one dear to me through a serious illness - I would unhesitatingly, and with good conscience, seek the support and power of endurance coca can give.

Mr. Eber Caudwell published an interesting account in the British Medical Journal (vol. i., p. 17, 1888) of the effect coca had on himself in enabling him to go through long hours of toil without sleep, and while preserving his full mental activity and vigour. When the pedestrian Weston was performing his feats of walking, it was noticed that he was always chewing a greenish substance, and after repeated inquiries he at length admitted that this was coca, to which he trusted to maintain his muscular activity without fatigue. Singers find that coca enables them to inspire more deeply, and to hold their breath longer than they could otherwise do.

But coca is not without danger; and what to the poor Indian may suffice for food; what may enable the student to give the hours of sleep for study without increasing fatigue; what may yield to the traveller and labourer the power of accomplishment without inducing weariness, may become to the fashionable lady another source of self-indulgence. As a rule, all well-to-do persons are over-nourished, and the debility of which they frequently complain is not due to the want of food and stimulants, but to having fatigued and broken down the bodily machine in its efforts to digest and get rid of the amount of food, wine, and " strengthening substances " taken. The only-justification for adding coca to one's daily diet would be an undue amount of labour to be undertaken, or the lessening of the usual amount of food ingested. Coca gives to the Indian the power to endure a life of penurious toil and privation; in like manner a rigid asceticism should with us accompany the use of coca. The knowledge of its powers cannot fail, however, to be of value to the pedestrian and traveller, and to those who work hard and live low.