I20 A STUDY IN HEREDITY 



stitute a delight in Shakespeare, or Kant, or 

 Darwin for a craving for alcohol. The sensations, 

 the wants, are utterly and completely different. 

 They may co-exist, but are not in the least in- 

 terchangeable. Education may supply new 

 delights, but it can no more appease the desire 

 for intoxication than it can appease the desire 

 for warmth. Doubtless reasoners of a certain 

 class will argfue that the delight in warmth is 

 " natural," whereas the delight in alcohol is not, 

 and will find in the word a support as solid as 

 Mad Margaret found in " Basingstoke." Natural 

 or not, intoxication produces in men of a par- 

 ticular type sensations as delightful as those 

 induced by warmth, and as little influenced by 

 education. But the question is begged. The 

 pleasure in drunkenness is as natural as that in 

 warmth. The one is called forth by experience 

 of alcohol, the other by experience of cold. All 

 primitive races possess the power of delighting 

 in both. But the one is harmful, the other 

 beneficial ; and, therefore, while natural selection 

 is eliminating the one, it is preserving the 

 other. 



Education, therefore, does not affect the capacity 

 for enjoying alcohol, but there is this patent fact. 

 The better classes of the present time have, in 

 general, descended from the better classes of former 



