Given the ancient use everywhere of fermented drinks, given also the recognition of the rare evil of habitual drunkenness, it is instructive to note that before the sixteenth century there is (with one exception) no record of the habitual use of distilled liquors in Europe and the Near East, and (again with one exception) no record of the idea of the sinfulness of drink. First as to distilled liquors. Distillation of beverages was known in ancient China. The earliest European navigators to visit Tahiti found it practised by the savages there, which would indicate the probability of its great antiquity in that stagnant, primitive society. The word alcohol itself is of Arabic origin, like many similar words, such as _al_embic, _al_gebra, &c. The sweet, aromatic, liqueurs made by mediæval monks (Benedictine by the Benedictines, Chartreuse by the Carthusians, &c.), are hardly exceptions to the rule inasmuch as they are essentially cordials rather than beverages. Brandy (burnt-wine, brant wine, brandevin, brandy wine) was known in France from the fourteenth century but seems to have been drunk chiefly as a cordial, as it still is in that country to-day. At all events, the scanty references to it indicate that it was little used. The one considerable exception is the use of whisky (usquebaugh, pronounced whiskybaw) among the highland Scotch and the Irish. With these people whisky was traditional. The ancient Irish epics of Cuchulain and Finn are full of references to it, as the Homeric poems of references to wine. While the debate over the date of the Irish epics may cheerfully be left to specialists, it is certainly clear that they long antedate the sixteenth century. Like wine, beer, and cider among the other nations of Europe, whisky among the Irish certainly dates from before the commencement of written history. But, in Europe, before the sixteenth century, to Ireland and the Scotch highlands its use was confined.