3. THE STAGE OF MENTAL WEAKNESS.--The cerebrum is now implicated. The ideal and emotional faculties are quickened, while the will is weakened. The center of thought being overpowered, the mind is a chaos. Ideas flock in thick and fast. The tongue is loosened. The judgment loses its hold on the acts. The reason giving way, the animal instincts generally assume the mastery of the man. The hidden nature comes to the surface. All the gloss of education and social restraint falls off, and the lower nature stands revealed. The coward shows himself more craven, the braggart more boastful, the bold more daring, and the cruel more brutal. The inebriate is liable to become the perpetrator of any outrage that the slightest provocation may suggest. 4. THE STAGE OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS.--At last, prostration ensues, and the wild, mad revel of the drunkard ends with utter senselessness. In common speech, the man is "dead drunk." Brain and spinal cord are both benumbed. Fortunately, the two nervous centers which supply the heart and the diaphragm are the slowest to be influenced. So, even in this final stage, the breathing and the circulation still go on, though the other organs have stopped. Were it not for this, every person thoroughly intoxicated would die. [Footnote: Cold has a wonderful influence in hastening this stage, so that a person, previously only in the first stage of excitement, on going outdoors on a winter night, may rapidly sink into a lethargy (become _comatose_), fall, and die. He is then commonly said to have perished with cold. The signs of this coma are of great practical importance, since so many persons die in police stations and elsewhere who are really comatose, when they are supposed to be only sound asleep. The pulse is slow, and almost imperceptible. The face is pale, and the skin cold. "If the arm be pinched, it is not moved; if the eyeballs are touched, the lids will not sink." The respiration becomes slower and slower, and, if the person dies, it is because liquid collects in the bronchial tubes, and stops the passage of the air. The man then actually drowns in his own secretions.] EFFECT UPON THE BRAIN.--Alcohol seems to have a special affinity for the brain. This organ absorbs more than any other, and its delicate structure is correspondingly affected. The "Vascular enlargement" here reaches its height. The tiny vessels become clogged with blood that is unfitted to nourish, because loaded with carbonic acid, and deprived of the usual quantity of the life-giving oxygen.--HINTON. The brain is, in the language of the physiologist, malfunctioned. The mind but slowly rallies from the stupor of the fourth stage, and a sense of dullness and depression remains to show with what difficulty the fatigued organ recovers its normal condition. So marked is the effect of the narcotic poison, that some authorities hold that "a once thoroughly intoxicated brain never fully becomes what it was before."