On ether-drinking and extra-alcoholic intoxication / [Benjamin Ward Richardson].

  • Richardson, Benjamin Ward, 1828-1896.
Date:
[between 1876 and 1896?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On ether-drinking and extra-alcoholic intoxication / [Benjamin Ward Richardson]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    get’] restive in the dark and wouldn’t get fat.” The moral of this is very effective when we remember how many human beings get ready to die by gin and darkness. It is a delusion, then, to suppose that all the pleasures and advan¬ tages of the alcoholic existence are confined, by nature, to the higher animal, man. Nature providing for the exercise of free will, lets us learn to partake of what is even foreign to her rule. Man learns to make alcohol and offers it to other men, who take it and like it after they have gone through the nauseous ordeal, which Nature as a warning imposes, of learning to like it. It would be one of the strangest things in all living phenomena if this learning were con¬ fined to man. It would be as strange as the special phenomenon of the gift of speech in man, and would really suggest that wine was made for man alone. It happens in this case, however, that the strangeness of the phenomenon in relation to strong drink does not hold good. The lower animals—the cat, the dog, the horse, the calf, the pig, the jackass—nay even the goat which does not ordinarily drink water, can learn to enjoy strong drink equally with man. All-provident Nature, how wonderful is thy beneficence ! If the day should ever come when, under the extending guidance of man, the alcoholic constitution shall be generally introduced into the ranks of the lower animal kingdom, it is difficult to forecast what developmental changes will take place. There will be new races of the lower animals, and breeds inapproachable. What shorthorns we shall then have ! What a splendid new breed of sheep another Jonas Webb will send to the prize show ! What horses will run for the Derby ! what hounds pursue the flying Reynard ! What trust¬ worthy carrier pigeons there will be ! How much more faithfully and steadily the dog will serve his master ! What fine pathological cats, dropsical and drowsy, will purr on the hearth rugs ! What butcher’s meat will hang up in the shambles ! How the lions will roar and the monkeys gabble and chastise their better halves in the Zoological Gardens and travelling menageries ! With what skill the buyer of animals will alter his computations so as to estimate his bargains by the shorter life of that which he buys ! What modifications of tables the accident insurance offices will introduce by way of increased premiums for all travellers on horseback, and by teams on the roads ! How delicious it will be to cross footpaths in country fields where the oxen have so much brandy or beer put into their drinking-water, to keep them up and make them lively ! This truly will not be the day ‘‘ when the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the