occasional surfeits the craving for alimentary substances increases and decreases with the needs of the organism, while that of the poison drinker yields only to the temporary extinction of consciousness. In a state of nature every normal function is associated with a pleasurable sensation, and instead of resulting in agonizing reactions a feast of wholesome food is followed by a state of considerable physical comfort—“the beatific consciousness of perfect digestion,” as Baron Brisse describes the pleasures of the after dinner hour. But no length of practice will ever save the poison slave from the penalties of his sins against nature. Each full indulgence is followed by a full measure of woful retributions, while a half indulgence results in a half depression to the verge of world-weary despondency, or fails to satisfy the lingering thirst after a larger dose of the same stimulant. And every poison known to modern chemistry can beget that specific craving. “Entirely accidental circumstances, the accessibility of special drugs, imitativeness and the intercourse of commercial nations, the mere whims of fashion, the authority of medical recommendations, have often decided the first choice of a special stimulant, destined to become a national beverage” and a national curse. The contemporaries of the Veda writers fuddled with _soma-wine_, the juice of a narcotic plant of the Himalaya foothills. Their neighbors, the pastoral Tartars, get drunk on _Koumiss_, or fermented mare’s milk, an abomination which in Eastern Europe threatens to increase the list of imported poisons, while opium is gaining ground in our Pacific States as fast as lager beer, chloral and patent “bitters” on the Atlantic slope. The French have added _absinthe_ to their wines and liquors, the Turks _hasheesh_ and opiates to strong coffee. North America has adopted tea from China, coffee from Arabia (or originally from Ceylon), tobacco from the Caribbean savages, highwines from France and Spain, and may possibly learn to drink Mexican aloe-sap, or chew the coca leaves of the South American Indians. _Arsenic_ has its votaries in the southern Alps. _Cinnebar_ and _acetate of copper_ victimize the miners of the Peruvian Sierras. The Ashantees are so fond of _sorghum beer_ that their chieftains have to keep special bamboo cages for the benefit of quarrelsome drunkards. The pastor of a Swiss colony in the Mexican State of Oaxaca told me that the mountaineers of that neighborhood befuddle themselves with _cicuta syrup_, the inspissated juice of a kind of _hemlock_ that first excites and then depresses the cerebral functions, excessive garrulity being the principal symptom of the exalted stage of intoxication. A decoction of the common _fly toadstool_ (_agaricus maculatus_) inflames the passions of the Kamschatka natives, makes them pugnacious, disputative, but eventually splenetic (Chamisso’s “_Reisen_,” p. 322). The Abyssinians use a preparation of