PEKILS. — INTEMPERANCE, 129 



its influence wears off, there is little reaction. He, 

 accordingly, forms the appetite slowly, and the process 

 of destruction is slow. Another man, of fine nervous 

 organization, takes a glass of spirits, and every nerve in 

 his body tingles and leaps. The reaction is severe, 

 and the nerves cry out for more. The appetite, rapidly 

 formed, soon becomes uncontrollable, and the miserable 

 end is not long delayed. The higher development of the 

 nervous system, which comes with the progress of civil- 

 ization, renders men more sensitive to pain, more sus- 

 ceptible to the evil results which attend excess of any 

 kind. Savages may, almost with impunity, transgress 

 laws of health which would inflict on civilized men, for 

 like transgression, penalties well-nigh or quite fatal. It 

 would seem as if God intended that, as men sin against 

 the greater light which comes with increasing civiliza- 

 tion, they should suffer severer punishment. 



It has been shown that the use of intoxicants is more 

 dangerous for this generation than it has been for any 

 preceding generation; that it is more dangerous for in- 

 habitants of the nervous belt than for the remainder of 

 mankind ; tliat it is more dangerous for the people of the 

 United States than for other inhabitants of this belt. It 

 remains to be shown that it is more dangerous for the 

 people of the West than for those of the East. 



Among the principal causes which are operative to 

 render the typical American temperament more nervous 

 than the European is the greater dryness of our cli- 

 mate. ' ' Dr. Max von Pettenkof er has concluded, from 

 the investigations he has made into the comparative loss 

 of heat experienced by a person biieathing dry air and 

 one breathing damp air, that with the dry air more heat 

 is lost and more created, and, in consequence, the circu- 

 lation is quicker and more intense, life is more energetic, 

 and there is no opportunity for the excessive accumula- 

 tion of fat or flesh, or for the development of a phleg- 

 matically nervous temperament. " ^ The mountain 



1 C. E Young, in Popular Science Monthly, September, 1880. 



