emotions, her more voluble fancy, as well as her mere physical
weakness and weariness, have been to her, in all ages, a special
source of temptation; which it is to her honour that she has
resisted so much better than the physically stronger, and
therefore more culpable, man.

As for what the tree of knowledge was, there really is no need for
us to waste our time in guessing. If it was not one plant, then
it was another. It may have been something which has long since
perished off the earth. It may have been--as some learned men
have guessed--the sacred Soma, or Homa, of the early Brahmin race;
and that may have been a still existing narcotic species of
Asclepias. It certainly was not the vine. The language of the
Hebrew Scripture concerning it, and the sacred use to which it is
consecrated in the Gospels, forbid that notion utterly; at least
to those who know enough of antiquity to pass by, with a smile,
the theory that the wines mentioned in Scripture were not
intoxicating. And yet--as a fresh corroboration of what I am
trying to say--how fearfully has that noble gift to man been
abused for the same end as a hundred other vegetable products,
ever since those mythic days when Dionusos brought the vine from
the far East, amid troops of human Maenads and half-human Satyrs;
and the Bacchae tore Pentheus in pieces on Cithaeron, for daring
to intrude upon their sacred rites; and since those historic days,
too, when, less than two hundred years before the Christian era,
the Bacchic rites spread from Southern Italy into Etruria, and
thence to the matrons of Rome; and under the guidance of Poenia
Annia, a Campanian lady, took at last shapes of which no man must
speak, but which had to be put down with terrible but just
severity, by the Consuls and the Senate.