654 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tainly would be a wearing-out which would lead to a limited future. 

 So with the body under these lethal spells ; we may add a part, or we 

 may take a part away, but we can not by them maintain the uniform 

 and natural law of life. 



These agents create a desire, a craving for themselves, a new auto- 

 matic expression, a new sense of necessity which did not preexist, and 

 which never exists until it is acquired. This seems to me the most 

 perfect evidence of aberration. Whoever craves for anything is aber- 

 rant, and much craving for one thing is the most certain sign of a mad 

 mind. We all admit this truth when the craving becomes insatiable ; 

 but between the smallest persistent craving and the most lamentable 

 insatiate there is nothing more than degree ; the fact is the same, and 

 the movement along the line from the moderate toward the insatiate 

 is commonly too easy and continuous. Craving for purely natural 

 things in the midst of them is an unknown phenomenon in healthy 

 men. Craving for unnatural things in the midst of them is well 

 known ; but is that healthy ? The sane man who wants water asks 

 for it ; the sane animal that wants water seeks for it ; the aberrant 

 man clutches wine ; the aberrant animal, rendered aberrant by the 

 acquired craving, grows furious. No man drinks wine as he drinks 

 water ; there is a furor in the drinking of wine which marks a phenom- 

 enal disturbance, and which is distinct from the simple act of drinking 

 from necessity, in the act as well as in the object. 



The establishment of the craving or desire for these lethal agents 

 in one living body is the frequent origin of the same desire in bodies 

 that are to be. The craving is thus sometimes begotten of a craving, 

 like other hereditary taints which lead to physical and mental errors 

 and diseases, a specific indication of aberration from the natural health 

 into disease, depending on hereditary constitutional tendency, and 

 singularly indicative of original departure from the natural life. A 

 still more striking illustration of the position I am now supporting is 

 afforded in another action of these agents. The tendency of their 

 action is, as a rule, toward premature physical death : the tendency is 

 also toward premature mental death. A sudden excess of indulgence 

 by any one of them, save perhaps arsenic, is all but certain to lead to 

 some form of acute mental derangement or stupor, more or less deci- 

 sive and prolonged. A gradual excessive indulgence is almost as cer- 

 tain to lead to a confirmed condition of aberration more or less deter- 

 minate. If we watch carefully the career of a man who is passing 

 through the course of an alcoholic intoxication, and if, after analyzing 

 each phase of that j^rogress, we pass into a lunatic asylum and look at 

 the various phases of insanity exhibited in the persons of the different 

 inmates who are there confined, there is no difficulty in finding repre- 

 sented, through certain of those unfortunates, all the shades of mental 

 aberration which have previously been exhibited by the single person 

 in the course of his rapid career from sanity into insanity and into 



