CHAPTER XIII. Drunkenness Judicially Considered, 190 CHAPTER XIV. Method of Curing the Habit of Drunkenness, 197 CHAPTER XV. Temperance Societies, 223 CHAPTER XVI. Advice to Inveterate Drunkards, 236 CHAPTER XVII. Effects of Intoxicating Agents on Nurses and Children, 241 CHAPTER XVIII. Liquors not always Hurtful, 246 APPENDIX. No. I. Excerpt from Paris’ Pharmacologia, 257 No. II. Mr. Brande’s Table of the Alcoholic Strength of Liquors, 260 CHAPTER I. PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. Drunkenness is not, like some other vices, peculiar to modern times. It is handed down to us from “hoar antiquity;” and, if the records of the antediluvian era were more complete, we should probably find that it was not unknown to the remotest ages of the world. The cases of Noah and Lot, recorded in the sacred writings, are the earliest of which tradition or history has left any record; and both occurred in the infancy of society. Indeed, wherever the grape flourished, inebriation prevailed. The formation of wine from this fruit, was among the earliest discoveries of man, and the bad consequences thence resulting, seem to have been almost coeval with the discovery. Those regions whose ungenial latitudes indisposed them to yield the vine, gave birth to other products which served as substitutes; and the inhabitants rivalled or surpassed those of the south in all kinds of Bacchanalian indulgence—the pleasures of drinking constituting one of the most fertile themes of their poetry, in the same manner as, in other climates, they gave inspiration to the souls of Anacreon and Hafiz.