98 A STUDY IN HEREDITY 



afflicted by it, the least temperate are those who have 

 had Kttle or no experience of it. Every race, in fact, 

 is temperate strictly in proportion to its past suffer- 

 ings through alcohol. The inhabitants of the wine 

 countries, the South Europeans, are notoriously the 

 most temperate in the world. Most savages, when 

 they have the opportunity, are furious drunkards. 

 North Europeans and their colonists lie between 

 the two extremes. They are more drunken than 

 South Europeans, and less drunken than savages. 

 Here, then, as elsewhere, the Neo-Darwinian 

 doctrine is decisively confirmed by an appeal to 

 facts, whereas the Lamarckian hypothesis, founded 

 as it is solely on a priori reasoning, again breaks 

 down utterly. 



There is, besides, ample testimony that races, 

 which have long used alcohol, were anciently more 

 drunken than at the present day. The Jews are a 

 case in point. Warnings against drunkenness are 

 common enough in the older Scriptures, but they 

 grow rarer till they practically cease in the New 

 Testament — or rather, in the New Testament they 

 are addressed almost solely to Gentiles. When 

 the Jews entered Egypt they were a race of 

 wandering and predatory shepherds, growing no 

 vines, and drinking no wine except such as they 

 captured or purchased. After leaving Egypt, during 

 the wanderings in the wilderness, they had few 



