THE PRESENT EVOLUTION OF MAN — MENTAL 327 



less tlian the latter, e.g. the iuhabitaiits of North 

 Europe, the English for example. 



The question as to how the craving for alcohol and 

 other narcotics, the love for those frames of mind which 

 they severally induce, arose, can be answered in one way 

 only. It can have arisen only as a bye-product of mental 

 evolution, a bye-product which, in the absence of nar- 

 cotics, was harmless, but which in the presence of them is 

 harmful, and against which, in races long afflicted by this 

 or that narcotic, a secondary evolution has occurred ; just 

 such a bye-product as the paresis which accompanies 

 the life-saving faculty of fear {e.g. in birds or frogs, 

 "fascinated" or frightened by snakes), against which 

 also a secondary evolution is also doubtless occurring. In 

 intellectually the highest animals only is the love for 

 that state of mind which narcotics induce present, and 

 only in the highest of all animals, i. e. only in man, is the 

 craving for that state of mind present in the greatest 

 degree. Elephants and monkeys, but not fish or 

 reptiles, for instance, can be brought to enjoy indulgence 

 in alcohol ; in man alone is the love for such indulgence 

 easily awakened. 



I conceive it is impossible that any thinking person 

 will deny the reality of this evolution. Even though 

 it should be denied that the whole organic world has 

 arisen by evolution, it must be admitted by all that the 

 races of mankind, originally alike, because descended 

 from a common ancestry, have diverged each one from all 

 the others in this or that particular, in shape, in colour, 

 in size, in the power of resisting disease, in the craving 

 for alcohol, &c., through a process of evolution, which 

 can only have been through the accumulation of inborn 

 or of acquired variations, or both. We have already 

 considered at length the question as to whether acquired 

 variations are transmissible, and have decided that they 

 are not, and therefore we may conclude, a i)rior% that 



