It is a custom with some people to blame, without limit, those who indulge in nervous stimulants of a nature differing from their own, while serving the same purpose. Thus, one who thinks that Providence never designed his corporeal frame to become a perambulating beer-barrel, eschews all alcoholic drinks, but at the same time eschews not the abuse of those who think fit to indulge in a little wine for their stomach’s sake, or a draught of porter for their bodily infirmities. These same abstainers still adhere to their tea and coffee, and though harmless enough as these dietetics may be, yet they in part serve the purposes for which others employ alcoholic stimulants. An eminent chemist states that persons accustomed to the use of wine, when they take cod liver oil, soon lose the taste and inclination for wine. The Temperance Societies should therefore canonise cod liver oil. It is true that thousands have lived without a knowledge of tea or coffee; and daily experience teaches, that under certain circumstances they may be dispensed with without disadvantage to the merely animal vital functions. “But it is an error,” writes Liebig, “certainly, to conclude from this that they may be altogether dispensed with in reference to their effects; and it is a question whether, if we had no tea and no coffee, the popular instinct would not seek for and discover the means of replacing them. Science, which accuses us of so much in these respects, will have, in the first place, to ascertain whether it depends on the sensual and sinful inclinations merely, that every people of the globe has appropriated some such means of acting on the nervous life—from the shore of the Pacific, where the Indian retires from life for days, in order to enjoy the bliss of intoxication with coca, to the Arctic regions, where the Kamtschatdale and Koriakes prepare an intoxicating beverage from a poisonous mushroom. We think it, on the contrary, highly probable, not to say certain, that the instinct of man, feeling certain blanks, certain wants of the intensified life of our times, which cannot be satisfied or filled up by mere quantity, has discovered, in these products of vegetable life, the true means of giving to his food the desired and necessary quality. Every substance, in so far as it has a share in the vital processes, acts in a certain way on our nervous system, on the sensual appetites, and the will of man.” So, although some have no tobacco, they find in the use of hemp or opium a substitute for that vegetable which nature has denied them. There can be no doubt that had we never become acquainted with tobacco or gin, we should have discovered and used some other narcotic in the place of the one, and a no less fiery and injurious form of alcohol instead of the other. To talk of the _degraded_ Chinese as _barbarians_, indulging to an awful extent in opium, and the _ignorant_ Hindoo and Arab, as in madness revelling