THE FARMER AT HOME. 13 5 



folly and forgetfulness, gaiety, and delirious joy. It and opium are, in 

 truth, succedanea for wine ; for, in all countries, men constantly seek 

 after something or other to rouse and exhilerate their spirits, arid bring 

 on that mental state which relieves them from every care. This dis- 

 position, however, prevails most in cold climates ; for drunkenness is 

 observed to increase in proportion as we recede from the equator. 

 The stimulus of heat being deficient, it would appear in cold cli- 

 mates, men feel more the want of another stimulus, and are thus led 

 to the excessive use of intoxicating liquors. 



The effects of inebriating liquors will be very different at different 

 times. They will vary with the habit of intoxication, the fullness or 

 emptiness of the stomach, the time of the day, the heat of the climate, 

 the season of the year, the temperature of the room, and in short with 

 whatever tends to vary the excitability of the system. Every persou 

 knows, that less liquor will produce intoxication in the forenoon 

 than after dinner ; and we learn from Captain Bligh's narrative, that 

 when he and his companions in an open boat in their passage to 

 Timor, were, from a scarcity of provisions, reduced to a state of 

 almost continued fasting, a single teaspoonful of rum produced ine- 

 briation. This state of the system has been called accumulated 

 excitability. But in typhus fever it seems to be in a state directly 

 opposite ; for then two or even three bottles of wine will sometimes 

 be used in the four-and-twenty hours, and that too by delicate females, 

 without inconvenience. 



It is not uncommon to hear people say that they have known 

 many hard drinkers live to a great age ; and that if spirituous liquors 

 be a poison, as physicians and moralists tell them that they are, they 

 must indeed be a very slow poison, for such a person of their acquain- 

 tance has now attained his 80th year, for example, and yet has 

 drunk hard all his life. This, however, is a very gross and most 

 pernicious deception, much resembling the lists of remarkable cures 

 said to be performed by quacks. You hear of those that have sur- 

 vived their prescriptions, but nothing of those who have perished. 



We shall here put down a few of the most curious instances, of 

 mental hallucination, that have been ascertained to proceed from 

 excess in drinking. Athena3us tells us, that a drunken crew at 

 Agrigentum in Sicily, hearing the winds roar on the house in which 

 they happened to be, became so fully persuaded that they were on 

 board ship, and in danger of suffering shipwreck, that they threw all 

 the furniture out of the windows, under the idea that they were 

 lightening the ship. A drunken man has been known to whip a post 

 because it would not move out of his way ; and an old gentleman of 

 eighty, when intoxicated, once took a lamp-post for a lady, and 

 addressed her in all the impassioned language of love. Junius men- 

 tions the case of a drunken man who was stopped in his progress by 

 the shadow of a sign-post, which he thought it impossible to get over ; 



