Huntsville gazette., 1885-04-11
STIMULANTS.
The Craving for Them an Almost Universal
Human Appetite.

The Craving for Them an Almost Universal
Human Appetite.
The desire or craving for stimulants
in the most general sense Of the word
for drugs acting upon the nerves
whether as excitant or sedative agents
is an almost, if not absolutely, uni
versal human appetite; so general, so
early developed, that we might almost
call it an instinct. Alcohol, of course,
is the most popular, under ordinary
by far the most widely diffused of all
stimulant substances. From the Eu-
pirates to the Straits of Dover the
vine has been from the earliest ages
second only to corn in popular estima-
ton; wine, next to bread, the most
priced and most universal article of
human food, The connection between
Ceres and Bacchus is found in almost
every language as in the social life of
| every nation, from the warlike Assyr-
ian Monarchy, the stable hierocratic
despotism of Egypt, to the modern
French Republic and German Empire.
Corn itself has furnished stimulants
second in popularity to wine alone; the
spirit which delighted the fiercer, sterner
races of Northern Europe Swede,
Norwegian and Dane, ST. Olaf and
Harold Hardrada, as their descendants
of to-day; and the ale of our own Saxon
and Scandinavian ancestry, which
neither spirit, cider, nor Spanish wine
has superseded among ourselves. The
vine, again, seems to have been native
to America, but the civilized or semi
civilized races of the southern and
central part of the Western Continent
had other more popular and
more peculiar stimulants, also for
the most part alcoholic. The
palm, again, has furnished to African
and. Asiatic tribes spirit not less po-
tent or less noxious, not less popular
and probably. not less primitive, than
whisky or beer. But where alcohol has
been unknown, among races to whose
habits and temperament it was alien,
or in climates where so powerful an ex-
citant produced effects too palpably
alarming to be tolerated by rulers or
law-givers royal or priestly, other and
milder stimulants and sedatives are
found in equally universal use. Till
the white man introduced among them
his own destructive beverages, till the
''tire water" spread Generalization and
disease, tobacco was the favorite indul-
gence of the red Indian of North Amer
lea, and very probably of that mighty
race which preceded them and seems
to have disappeared before they came
upon the scene-the Mound-bu builders,
whose gigantic works bear testimony to
the existence of an agriculture scarcely
less advanced or less prolific, despot-
ism probably no less absolute than that
of Egypt. Coffee has for ages been al
most equally dear to the Arab: tea has
been to China all that wine is and was
to Europe, probably from still earlier
period, and has taken hold on the
Northern, as coffee and tobacco on the
Southern, branches of the Tartar race.
Opium, or drugs resembling opium in
character, have been found as well
suited to the temper, as delightful to
the taste, of the quieter and more pas
sive Oriental races as wine to the Aryan
and Semitic nations. The Malays, the
Vikings of the East Indies, found in
-bharg drug the most exciting and
maddening in its effects of any known
to civilized or uncivilized man; a SUBJ
stitute for opium or hasheesh bearing
much the same relation to those seda-
tives as brandy or whisky to the light
wines of Southern Europe. National
ReUieW