Looking, then, at the opinions here expressed, and at all the circumstances, we think our readers will agree with us in saying that it would be very unwise and injurious to attempt, by pressure or coercion, to interfere with the employment of alcohol by regular medical practitioners when they deem it requisite. But, on the other hand, society is under deep obligations to those who are endeavouring to replace it by other remedies, and more particularly to the philanthropists who have recently established an hospital from which the use of alcohol is entirely excluded. The great benefit that such an institution will confer, not only upon the medical profession but upon the whole community, is that it will lead to the limitation of the use of alcohol in diseases, and will prevent its prescription merely to gratify the taste of self-indulgent patients. Eventually, too, it may lead to the discontinuance of the use of alcohol even for medicinal purposes.[371] Two other causes, concerning which there will be no difference of opinion, have been assigned for the prevalence of intemperance, and these lie at the very root of the whole matter. Whether, technically speaking, the love of intoxicating drink be or be not “instinctive,” it is a human passion, and certainly it is in many cases hereditary. As we showed in our opening chapter, those who refuse to regard it as an instinct are driven to acknowledge that it is an “inbred enemy,”[372] which is transmissible by inheritance; and one writer on temperance speaks of the enjoyments which accompany the use of alcohol in terms sufficiently vague to show that he has no very clear views on the matter. “It is something transferred from the category of drugs into that of food,” he says, “because in its effects it is pleasant or ‘delightful to the senses.’ In its effects, we say, for as regards itself, the ‘daintiness’ and ‘deliciousness,’ and ‘gratifying of the appetite,’ are generally not instinctive but acquired.”[373] But it is precisely this “deliciousness,” and the pleasurable sensations which accompany its use, that have caused the passion for drink to obtain so great a mastery over a large portion of mankind, and it is a waste of words to tell people who find intoxicating drink dainty and delicious and pleasant to the senses, that they must discontinue its use because it is _generally_ an acquired taste, and does not form part of their instinctive nature. That the forms in which alcohol is imbibed are often very unpalatable, there can be no doubt. If the “soma” drink of the ancient Aryans at all resembled that which the modern Brahmans permitted M. Haug to taste, the gustatory sense amongst the primitive races of men could not have been very refined, and we question whether it needed less education than the palate which can find enjoyment in gin and bitters, or in a tumblerful of Scotch whisky diluted with cold water. But it is the physiological