relieving pain and analgesics, veiling the memories of care and and lastly, they act as anæsthetics, and inflict stupefaction, relaxation and collapse, coma and death. sorrow; A very slight examination of the properties of each of them separately will show how greatly they differ in the proportion of the varied effects above indicated. Wines exhilarate promptly and notably; beers much less in comparison. These latter pass readily on to the fourth stage, with little intermediate influence, and produce a sort of stolidity and impassiveness, a quasi stupor; but they stop there, and rarely run into collapse. Wines, especially the sparkling, are transient in their effect, and are so far safe that, when pure, it requires a large quantity to carry the subject beyond the second stage. The least fiery, champagne, the Rhenish, clarets and santemes, may be so leisurely taken as to protract the first agreeable feeling of exhilaration when the subject enjoys any firmness of character or force of will. Hence wine-growing countries which consume their own products are comparatively temperate. I am glad that our own wide domains seem specially fitted for the culture and manufacture of these light wines: The Catawba of the West, the Hocks of California, and the Scuppernong Riparian of Florida, deserve encouragement, and will by and bye be abundant and cheap enough, as they are already good enough, to do away the wish for stronger drinks. But, unhappily, in a large class of cases this exhilaration, so pleasant, and in comparison so innocent an enjoyment, soon ceases to be the condition aimed at or wished for. Destined to fall, the intemperate man abandons wine and beer, if indeed he had ever been satisfied with their moderate and qualified effect, and seeks a less tardy route through the second to the third stage, which he would gladly rest in and render permanent indeed if it were possible. He drowns care and remorse, and forgets pain and sorrow; but these immunities are purchased at an immense and ruinous price, and in his progress through the stage of excitement and uncontrollable passion, with the terrible risk of injury and destruction to all his surroundings, to himself personally, and to all who are dear to or valued and held in esteem by him. The collapse into which he plunges finally is at first productive of immense suffering as a consequence, but this suffering, Nature's warning and protective rebound, soon fails to recur, or rather is supplanted by another and more intolerable form of suffering, the result of an intense craving for the renewal of the narcotism. Wherever men exist they delight in a temporary suspension of conscious being. Sleep, which takes up one-third of our lives, is eulogized everywhere "by saint, by savage, and by sage," by poet and philosopher, the toil-worn laborer and the idle Turk, by Shakspeare, Young, and Sancho Panza alike, as a happy and enviable condition. Active life is a ceaseless struggle for the mass; a state of endurance rather than enjoyment; a battle fought with the certainty of final defeat; a burden of oppressive care interspersed with wearisome grief and pain, and anxieties proportioned very generally to the intelligence of the subject. Therefore it is that on emerging from the lowest animal savagism, each tribe seems to avail itself of such stimulant narcotics within their reach as will intoxicate and stupify them, and which they have discovered by whatever accident. They avail themselves eagerly of these properties wherever they find them, and barter all their valuables to obtain access to them. Kennan tells us that he has known twenty dollars' worth of furs given among the Korak Indians for a single mushroom-the amanita, which they call muck-a-moor, to get drunk on. We, all of us, know that similar madness is common in our highest civilization. The requisite qualities sought for and appropriated by this strong instinct are, unhappily, bound together in an eminent degree in alcohol, which, from its universal presence, can be procured more conveniently and cheaply than any other, and seems readily to supplant all others when introduced and offered. I greatly fear, too, that there is some obscure elective affinity which will always make it the chosen poison of certain tribes, races, and nations, who prefer and riot in it with an excess of eagerness, apparently in direct ratio with their susceptibility to its injurious influences. This is particularly true of the Indian and the negro, both of whom it rapidly consumes and destroys. At the present day, however, there are millions who do not know it at all. May they never come to such knowledge of evil! but who satisfy this urgent craving of humanity, the desire of anaesthesia, insensibility, temporary oblivion, suspension of annoyance mental and bodily, with other drugs within their reach; other agents similarly efficacious and productive of vastly less risk to themselves, and of danger and injury to those about them. All men, everywhere, I repeat, as all love sleep, desire and seek after a suspension of conscious life which resembles sleep. It is an instinctive propensity which will and must be gratified, and which cannot be suppressed or extinguished. It is conceded by physicians that the excessive force of this propensity which we call intemperance is truly a disease; it follows, therefore, that we must treat it upon received and rational methods. "The great therapeutic principle of substitution," says the lamented Trousseau, rules at present supreme in medical practice." Let us apply it here. Of all the forms of intemperance, it will be at once admitted that alcoholic drunkenness is the very worst. The opium-eater may be stolid, useless, burdensome, wretched; but he is harmless, and wraps himself quietly up in his dreams. The Kawa chewer and drinker sits passive and imbecile, and suffers, Job-like, in his own person nothing but the infliction of cutaneous disease. Haschich sometimes maddens its victim, but its general influence is cheerful, maudlin stupefaction, or mere uncontrollable restlessness. But the alcoholic drunkard is always "voluntarius demon." All that is good in human nature is abolished; all that is evil intensified in him; cruel, reckless, a wife-beater, a homicide, foul, in his person and disgusting in his language and habits, suicidal of health and of reputation, he is an intolerable nuisance from which his death alone can relieve us. For the ex perience of ages has taught us that the factitious propensity, the artificial instinct of which he is the victim, is not only most intense, but most tenacious, and intractable. Our efforts at his cure have failed; chiefly, I think, because we have insisted upon his abstinence and reform; efforts of which he is incapable. Let us try Trosseau's method of substitution, and offer him alternatives, varied methods of gratification and relief. The ingenuity which dresses up his familiar poison with so many agreeable additions of flavor and odor will surely avail us in presenting him with safer draughts of the juice of the poppy, the resin from the Indian hemp used even in their sweetmeats by the Hindoos, the amanita muscaria, the kawa or piper me-thisticum, and the coca of Bolivia and Peru. If physicians will prescribe these formulæ freely, frankly and openly, druggists will soon find their profit in preparing them; and I will venture the prophecy that the first cabaret or restaurant in which such variety of enticing beverages is made agreeable to the palate and convenient to general use, will accumulate a rapid fortune. A gentleman long resident at Cairo, in Egypt, told me that it was common in their clubs, excursions, pic-nics, etc., for each one to take with him his favorite tipple; and that it was generally agreed, all things considered, that the votaries of haschich came off best, both as to the current enjoyment and the physical state next day. We are told that Sir Humphrey Davy was in the habit of indulging his intimate friends with a few breaths of nitrous oxyd gas as a change from the accustomed hospitality of a glass of wine or liqueur. A Tartar gentleman with the same feeling will offer you "a slice of mushroom," and when festively inclined will treat his retainers, nay, a whole village, with the potential material of the plant eliminated through his kidneys, and in this way retaining its efficiency through more than one set of conducting tubes. An undue dread of opinion hinders greatly the beneficial substitution of this drug of which Collingwood and others inform us that a very extensive employment spreads all over the East in a moderate and temperate degree, doing no more harm . than the temperate use of wine and beer in Europe. There can be no question that a similar habit is growing in our own country silently; nor can I bring myself to regret it, when I think of it as a most effective safety-valve and relief from alcoholic intemperance. We make horrible pictures for ourselves, and shudder at them, of opium-smoking, as in Edwin Drood, but we stop at the contemplation of the wretched state of the individual. How much the community is the gainer by his quiet stupefaction compared with the mad, demoniac fury of the whiskey drinker, it would indeed be difficult to estimate. We are profoundly affected by the confessions and suspiria of De Quincy; let us imagine him taking a corresponding amount daily of brandy, and we should never have had a volume of such admirable though prosy essays upon all subjects of literature and philosophy. We owe them every one to opium. And the unequalled eloquence of Robert Hall was probably poured out from the same source to which indeed he was indebted for the solace of a most painful life of disease and infirmity; as we are informed by his biographer that he took from 1,000 to 3,000 drops of laudanum in a day. Among the stimulant narcotics we may class some articles that are not properly intoxicating in the sense of inebriation or drunkenness, their effects being physical, and not psychical. Tea, coffee, and tobacco have come into general use from an early period, as affording to half-civilized peoples the enjoyment derived from any strong impression on the senses, no matter how disagreeable at first. Their soothing, gentle narcotism, an unconscious action upon the nervous system riveted their hold, and now they have spread their influence over the whole habitable globe. The distinct propensity which I have alluded to shows itself in the universal employment of all procurable condiments, salt, pepper, onions, garlic, mustard, etc. The first of these is apt to be spoken of indeed as a necessary of life. It is almost everywhere attainable, and wherever it is scarce, it is most highly prized. One exception alone is recorded. Petherick, in his "Travels in Africa," says of the Dinka tribe on |