The Discovery of Alcohol 
Translated from the French of M. Berthelot, by G. H. Hawtayne, C.M.G.* 
civilization. It is by hundreds of millions that 
the produce of the taxes imposed upon it in 
the budgets of the great European States is counted ; 
is by thousands of millions that the profits gained an 
this manufa€ture are to be reckoned in both town and 
country. The tax upon drinks, the licenses of reétifiers, 
the development of distilleries, are subje€ts of meditation 
for financiers and legislators; alcoholic liquors whether 
as food or poison or as substances useful to hygiene and 
in manufaétures, or harmful to health, are to be found 
everywhere. But if wine, beer, and mead, have been used 
since pre-historic times the active principle which is com- 
mon to them,—that which produces agreeable excitement 
or hurtful drunkenness, that which is concentrated in 
spirituous liquors—alcohol, has only been known for seven 
or eight centuries, and was unknownto antiquity. Perhaps 
it will not be uninteresting to tell how it was discovered. 
The history of the successive attempts of man in the 
discovery of useful things as well as of general truths is 
always worthy of our attention. We should be indifferent 
to nothing which concerns the progress and the suc- 
cessive phases of the human mind. 
Sic unum quid quid paulatim protrahit ztas 
In medium ratioque in luminis eruit oras ; 
Namque alid ex alio clarescere corde videmus 
Artibus ad summum donec venere cacumen. —Lueretius. 
* La Découverte de |’Alcool et la Distillation, par M. Marcelin 
Berthelot. Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 Novembre, 1892. 
M 
