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.

But it matters little, I say, what this same tree of knowledge was. Was
every vine on earth destroyed to-morrow, and every vegetable also from
which alcohol is now distilled, man would soon discover something else
wherewith to satisfy the insatiate craving. Has he not done so already?
Has not almost every people had its tree of knowledge, often more deadly
than any distilled liquor, from the absinthe of the cultivated Frenchman,
and the opium of the cultivated Chinese, down to the bush-poisons
wherewith the tropic sorcerer initiates his dupes into the knowledge of