no A STUDY IN HEREDITY 



able to argue that, if a party of a hundred men 

 drank a hundred glasses of wine, and another party 

 of five drank ninety-nine, the hundred would be 

 more drunken than the five. The per capita 

 consumption of alcohol is very low amongst the 

 Tierra del Fuegians and Australian Blacks ; but 

 we cannot on that account reckon them as 

 temperate to a transcendental degree. 



Since all races which alcohol has afflicted have 

 grown less and less prone to excessive indulgence, 

 and since all races that have had no previous 

 experience of alcohol are intensely prone to 

 excessive indulgence, it is plain that the consti- 

 tution of mind which renders excessive indulgence 

 delightful, arose in Man quite apart from the use 

 U of alcohol. It was the primitive condition of the 

 \} human mind, and was the cause of drinking, not, 

 as is popularly supposed, the product of drinking. 

 Indeed it is manifest that it could not have been 

 the product of drinking, since, originally, men 

 would not have drunk unless they had found 

 drinking pleasant. How that constitution of mind 

 arose is not material to our enquiry.^ The plain 

 fact is that it did arise somehow. 



The tendency to drunkenness is frequently 

 spoken of as a disease. The term appears to give 

 satisfaction to the charitable, but is hardly correct. 



1 Vide " The Present Evolution of Man," p. 327. 



