The average loss of weight in the animals experimented upon was 40 per cent., varying considerably in different cases, the variation depending chiefly on the relative amount of fat. Weighing the different tissues separately, and arranging them in two parallel columns, according as they lost more or less than 40 per cent., gave the following results:

Parts losing more than 40 per cent.

Parts losing less than 40 per cent.

Among the most noteworthy phenomena caused by starvation are the offensive effluvia exhaled from the sufferers, the fetor of their discharges, and the rapidity with which the body passes into a state of putrescence. Such a condition of things is peculiarly favorable to the reception of fever and other contagious diseases, and they acquire ■ in such cases an intensity and virulence rarely seen under other circumstances. Thus, as was fearfully seen in Ireland in 1847, pestilence follows in the train of famine. The effects of the prolonged employment of an insufficient diet alone are rarely seen; they are commonly complicated with those of unwholesome air and over-exertion. Of such complication, prisons, work-houses, and charitable institutions have afforded abundant examples on a large scale. One of the most noted of these occurred at the Milbank penitentiary, near London, in 1828. The prison is situated on marshy ground, which is below the level of the adjacent river, but it had previously been reputed healthy. A few months before the outbreak of the epidemic, the amount of dry nutriment allowed each prisoner daily had been reduced from between 31 and 33 oz. to 21 oz., and animal food was almost wholly withheld.

The prisoners were at the same time subjected to a low temperature, and to considerable muscular exertion. In a short time they became paler, weaker, and thinner; subsequently, scurvy, diarrhoea, and dysentery made their appearance, and finally low fevers, or headache, vertigo, convulsions, maniacal delirium, and apoplexy. The smallest loss of blood caused fainting. Of 860 prisoners, 437, or 52 per cent., were attacked. Those who had been longest confined suffered in the greatest proportion. The prisoners who were employed in the kitchen, who had an addition of 8 oz. of bread to their daily allowance, were not affected. Another well-marked epidemic, owing to a similar cause, occurred in the establishment for the destitute children of New York, at what was termed the Long Island farms, in the winter of 1889-40. The diet of the children consisted of bread of an inferior quality, with tea sweetened with molasses, night and morning, and soup made from coarse beef, alternately with the beef itself at noon; in addition the dormitories of the children were crowded and ill ventilated, and they had scarcely any outdoor exercise. "About the middle of December, 1839," says Dr. Morrell, the attending physician of the asylum (New York "Journal of Medicine and Surgery," vol. iii.), "evidences of a constitutional change in many of the children were apparent; they were dull and inactive, their eyes lacked lustre, and their skins exhaled an offensive odor." Next, many of them were attacked with slight cholera morbus, and afterward an incurable diarrhoea set in, attended with gangrene about the cheeks, the anus, or vagina.

In most of these cases sloughing of the cornea took place and the eye was destroyed. When for a length of time the allowance of food, either from its indigestibility or from its limited amount, has been insufficient for the wants of the system, the digestive organs are weakened; the appetite is lost, and the person often loathes food while he is suffering from starvation. In the experiments of Chossat, when turtle doves were placed upon a limited allowance of corn, but with access to water, part of the corn was either rejected by vomiting, accumulated in the crop, or passed unchanged through the bowels.