in whom there is a clear proclivity to insanity, _who would escape that
dreadful consummation but for drinking; excessive drinking in many
persons determining the insanity to which they are, at any rate,
predisposed_. The children of drunkards, he further said, are in a
larger proportion idiotic than other children, and in a larger
proportion become themselves drunkards; they are also in a larger
proportion liable to the ordinary forms of acquired insanity.

Dr. Winslow Forbes believed that in the habitual drunkard the whole
nervous structure, and the brain especially, became poisoned by alcohol.
All the mental symptoms which you see accompanying ordinary
intoxication, he remarks, result from the poisonous effects of alcohol
on the brain. It is the brain which is mainly effected. In temporary
drunkenness, the brain becomes in an abnormal state of alimentation, and
if this habit is persisted in for years, the nervous tissue itself
becomes permeated with alcohol, and organic changes take place in the
nervous tissues of the brain, producing _that frightful and dreadful
chronic insanity which we see in lunatic asylums, traceable entirely to
habits of intoxication_. A large percentage of frightful mental and
brain disturbances can, he declared, be traced to the drunkenness of
parents.

Dr. D.G. Dodge, late of the New York State Inebriate Asylum, who, with.
Dr. Joseph Parrish, gave testimony before the committee of the House of
Commons, said, in one of his answers: "With the excessive use of
alcohol, functional disorder will invariably appear, and no organ will
be more seriously affected, and possibly impaired, than the brain. _This
is shown in the inebriate by a weakened intellect, a general debility of
the mental faculties_, a partial or total loss of self-respect, and a
departure of the power of self-command; all of which, acting together,