4. There is another class of works whose meaning and beauty are illustrated by a knowledge of fable, viz., paintings, coins, statues, and the like. These are so many enigmas to persons ignorant of mythology, which is often the only key to their interpretation. TEMPERANCE TEACHINGS OF SCIENCE; OR, THE POISON PROBLEM. BY FELIX L. OSWALD, M.D. CHAPTER I.—THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. “Consistency is the Test of Truth.”—WILBERFORCE. Among the strange legends of the Middle Ages there are certain traditions which have evidently a figurative significance, and whose origin has often been traced to the allegorical mythology of an earlier age. An allegory of that sort is the legend of the “Marvel of Nikolsburg,” near Vienna; a miraculous image that appeared always an inch higher than the person standing before it. “It overtopped a giant, and all but condescended to the stature of a dwarf,” says the tradition. That image is a symbol of nature. The lowest savage must dimly recognize the fact that man can not measure his cunning against the wisdom of the Creator, and the highest development of science has only revealed its own incompetence to imitate, or even comprehend, the structural perfection of the simplest living organism. The Author of life deals only in masterpieces; the marvelous fitness of his contrivances is as infinite in his smallest as in his greatest works, and the apparent exceptions from that rule can nearly all be traced to the influence of abnormal circumstances. Our own interference with the order of nature has caused the discords in the harmony of creation which furnish the chief arguments of pessimism. The winter torrents which devastate the valleys of southern France with a fury which Condorcet calls the “truculence of a vainly worshiped heaven,” flowed in harmless brooks till the hand of man destroyed the protecting forests that absorbed and equalized the drainage of the Alpine slopes, the same imprudence has turned the gardens of the East into deserts and obstructed with sandbars the channels of once navigable rivers. The wanton extermination of woodbirds has revenged itself by insect plagues. Consumption, that cruel scourge of the human race, is the direct consequence of the folly which makes us prefer the miasma of our tenement-prisons to the balm of God’s free air. We are too apt to confound the results of our sins against nature with the original arrangements of Providence. But the strangest instance of that mistake is the fallacy which has long biased our dealings with the curse of the alcohol habit. Drunkards plead their inability to resist the promptings of an imperious appetite. Their friends lament the antagonism of nature and duty, the weakness of the flesh frustrating the resolves of a willing spirit. Even temperance orators dwell on the dangers of “worldly temptations,” of “selfish, sensual indulgences,” as if the alcohol habit