332 THE PRESENT EVOLUTION OF MAN — MENTAL 



The ancient conditions as regards alcohol, like those 

 regarding tuberculosis, are still persistent in various 

 savage countries, in consequence of which we are enabled 

 to institute comparisons between savage and civilized 

 races, and therefore, in effect, between ancient and 

 modern communities. In Guiana, for instance, the 

 natives manufacture an intoxicant from cassava, of 

 which a debauch of from thirty-six to forty-eight hours 

 is necessary before the wished-for state of drunkenness 

 is attained. The art of manufacturing alcohol must 

 have been as imperfect among our early ancestors as 

 among the Indians of Guiana; their first intoxicant 

 must have been as dilute, indulgence to excess must 

 have been at least as difficult, and the elimination of the 

 unfit equally small. Under such conditions the least 

 resistant individuals only of those that had the best 

 opportunities for excessive indulgence can have perished. 

 As the art improved, as intoxicants of greater and 

 greater strength were manufactured, as indulgence to 

 excess became more and more easy. Alcoholic Selec- 

 tion must have been exercised with greater and 

 greater severity, and as a consequence, the evolution 

 of the races afiected must have proceeded further 

 and further, with the result, in modern days, that 

 some races have evolved so far that they are able 

 to persist in the presence of what is practically an un- 

 limited supply of alcohol. In Italy, for instance, until 

 lately the peasantiy, for a very trifling sum, drank at 

 their taverns by the hour, not by the quantity, a custom 

 that afforded great facilities for intemperance. 



Various explanations other than that given above have 

 been offered of racial differences in respect to over-in- 

 dulgence in alcohol, all of them extremely unsatisfactory. 

 It is said that some races are by nature abstemious. 

 This is certainly true, but no attempt has been made 

 to explain how this difference in " nature " arose. It 



