centres are unbalanced and thrown into chaos, the rational part of the
nature of the man gives way before the emotional, passional or organic
part. The reason is now off duty, or is fooling with duty, and all the
mere animal instincts and sentiments are laid atrociously bare. The
coward shows up more craven, the braggart more boastful, the cruel more
merciless, the untruthful more false, the carnal more degraded. '_In
vino veritas_' expresses, even, indeed, to physiological accuracy, the
true condition. The reason, the emotions, the instincts, are all in a
state of carnival, and in chaotic feebleness.

"Finally, the action of the alcohol still extending, the superior brain
centres are overpowered; the senses are beclouded, the voluntary
muscular prostration is perfected, sensibility is lost, and the body
lies a mere log, dead by all but one-fourth, on which alone its life
hangs. The heart still remains true to its duty, and while it just lives
it feeds the breathing power. And so the circulation and the
respiration, in the otherwise inert mass, keeps the mass within the bare
domain of life until the poison begins to pass away and the nervous
centres to revive again. It is happy for the inebriate that, as a rule,
the brain fails so long before the heart that he has neither the power
nor the sense to continue his process of destruction up to the act of
death of his circulation. Therefore he lives to die another day.

* * * * *

"Such is an outline of the primary action of alcohol on those who may be
said to be unaccustomed to it, or who have not yet fallen into a fixed
habit of taking it: For a long time the organism will bear these
perversions of its functions without apparent injury, but if the
experiment be repeated too often and too long, if it be continued after