Nature is quite human in that respect. But you can reform Nature as you
can human beings by looking out for heredity and culture. In this way
Mother Nature has been quite cured of her bad habit of putting seeds in
bananas and oranges. Figs she still persists in adulterating with
particles of cellulose as nutritious as sawdust. But we can circumvent
the old lady at this. I got on Christmas a package of figs from
California without a seed in them. Somebody had taken out all the
seeds--it must have been a big job--and then put the figs together again
as natural looking as life and very much better tasting.

Sugar and alcohol are both found in Nature; sugar in the ripe fruit,
alcohol when it begins to decay. But it was the chemist who discovered
how to extract them. He first worked with alcohol and unfortunately
succeeded.

Previous to the invention of the still by the Arabian chemists man could
not get drunk as quickly as he wanted to because his liquors were
limited to what the yeast plant could stand without intoxication. When
the alcoholic content of wine or beer rose to seventeen per cent. at the
most the process of fermentation stopped because the yeast plants got
drunk and quit "working." That meant that a man confined to ordinary
wine or beer had to drink ten or twenty quarts of water to get one
quart of the stuff he was after, and he had no liking for water.

So the chemist helped him out of this difficulty and got him into worse
trouble by distilling the wine. The more volatile part that came over
first contained the flavor and most of the alcohol. In this way he could
get liquors like brandy and whisky, rum and gin, containing from thirty
to eighty per cent. of alcohol. This was the origin of the modern liquor
problem. The wine of the ancients was strong enough to knock out Noah