650 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



taining opium is an abused, much-abused system. The adults who 

 indulge are, according to my experience, of three classes : There are 

 some who in the course of disease attended with long-continued acute 

 pain, like neuralgia pain, have found relief from opium, and who hav- 

 ing so become habituated to its use keep up the habit sometimes be- 

 cause they feel that they can not sleep without the drug, and some- 

 times because they have learned to experience a real luxury from its 

 use. There is a limited section that has learned the practice of swal- 

 lowing or of smoking opium from some Eastern association, and is 

 professed in the practice in a certain moderate degree. Lastly, there 

 are a few doubtless among the poorest of the community, who in 

 some particular localities learn to partake of the narcotic, often not 

 being aware of its true nature, and obtaining it under some fanciful 

 name which has no direct reference to the narcotic itself. 



To the few who in these classes may be called opium-eaters might 

 be added a small number of alcoholic inebriates who partake of an 

 opiate occasionally with their spirituous potations. 



To whichever class they who habitually resort to opium may 

 belong, they pay dearly for their temporary pleasure. They are a 

 miserable set in mind as in body. They are preserved, as it were, in 

 misery ; they do not suffer acute diseases from their enemy, as the 

 alcoholics do, by which their lives are abruptly cut short, but they 

 continue depressed in mind, feeble and emaciated in body, and inca- 

 pable of any long-continued effort. De Quincey, in language some- 

 what figurative and poetical, has described the class with a force, and 

 on the whole a correctness, which may be accepted as a faithful 

 record. 



I can not report even so favorably on the use of absinthe as I 

 have reported above on the use of opium. There can not, I fear, be 

 a doubt that in large and closely packed towns and cities the consump- 

 tion of absinthe is on the increase. In London it is decidedly on the 

 increase. It is not possible to find a street in some parts of the me- 

 tropolis in which the word " absinthe " does not meet the eye in the 

 windows of houses devoted to the sale of other intoxicating and lethal 

 drinks. Much of this advertisement of an unusually dangerous poi- 

 son is made from ignorance of its nature as much as from cupidity. 

 The suggestion for offering absinthe is that it is an agreeable bitter, 

 that it gives an appetite, and that it gives tone to weak digestions. 

 It is proffered much in the same manner as gin and bitters, and as in 

 some private houses sherry and bitters are proffered. If you ask a 

 seller of absinthe what he vends it for, he tells you, " As a tonic to 

 help digestion." 



There is no more terrible mistake than this statement. Absinthe 

 as it is made in France, whence it is imported, is a mixture of essence 

 of wormwood (absinthium), sweet-flag, anise-seed, angelica-root, and 

 alcohol. It is colored green with the leaves or the juice of smallage, 





