were the result of an innate propensity—deplorable in its collateral consequences, but withal entitled to the compromising concessions which ascetic virtue owes to the cravings of an impetuous natural instinct. In other words, we palliate a flagrant crime against the physical laws of God, as if nature herself had lured us to our ruin; the votaries of alcohol plead their ignorance, as if the Providence that warns us against the sting of a tiny insect and teaches the eye to protect itself against a mote of dust, had provided no adequate safeguards against the greatest danger to health and happiness. And yet those safeguards would abundantly answer their protective purpose if persistent vice had not almost deadened the faculty of understanding the monitions of our physical conscience. It is true that the stimulant-thirst of the confirmed drunkard far exceeds the urgency of the most impetuous instincts, but by that very excessiveness and persistence the far-gone development of the alcohol habit proves what the mode of its incipience establishes beyond the possibility of a doubt, namely, the radical difference of its characteristics from those of a natural appetite. For, 1. UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES THE ATTRACTIVENESS OF ALIMENTARY SUBSTANCES IS PROPORTIONED TO THE DEGREE OF THEIR HEALTHFULNESS AND THEIR NUTRITIVE VALUE.—To the children of nature all hurtful things are repulsive, all beneficial things attractive. Providence has endowed our species with a liberal share of the protective instinct that teaches our dumb fellow-creatures to select their proper food, and even in this age of far-gone degeneration the dietetic predilections of children and primitive men might furnish the criteria of a general food reform. No creature is misled by an innate craving for unwholesome food, nor by an instinctive aversion to wholesome substances. Our natural repugnance to nearly all kinds of “medicines,” _i. e._, virulent stimulants, has already begun to be recognized as a suggestive illustration of that rule. A child’s hankering after sweetmeats is only an apparent exception, for, as Dr. Schrodt observes, the conventional diet of our children is so deficient in saccharine elements that instinct constantly strives to supply an unsatisfied want. Human beings fed chiefly on fruit syrups would instinctively hanker after farinaceous substances. The savages of our northwestern prairies are as fond of honey as their grizzly neighbors. Nurslings, deprived of their mothers’ milk, instinctively appreciate the proper component parts of artificial surrogates. Sailors in the tropics thirst after fruit, after refrigerating fluids, after fresh vegetables. In the arctic seas they crave calorific food—oil or fat.