Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/339

Rh less than the latter, e.g. the inhabitants of North Europe, the English for example.

The question as to how the craving for alcohol and other narcotics, the love for those frames of mind which they severally induce, arose, can be answered in one way onty. It can have arisen only as a bye-product of mental evolution, a bye-product which, in the absence of narcotics, was harmless, but which in the presence of them is harmful, and against which, in races long afflicted by this or that narcotic, a secondary evolution has occurred; just such a bye-product as the paresis which accompanies the life-saving faculty of fear (e.g. in birds or frogs, "fascinated" or frightened by snakes), against which also a secondary evolution is also doubtless occurring. In intellectually the highest animals only is the love for that state of mind which narcotics induce present, and only in the highest of all animals, i.e. only in man, is the craving for that state of mind present in the greatest degree. Elephants and monkeys, but not fish or reptiles, for instance, can be brought to enjoy indulgence in alcohol; in man alone is the love for such indulgence easily awakened.

I conceive it is impossible that any thinking person will deny the reality of this evolution. Even though it should be denied that the whole organic world has arisen by evolution, it must be admitted by all that the races of mankind, originally alike, because descended from a common ancestry, have diverged each one from all the others in this or that particular, in shape, in colour, in size, in the power of resisting disease, in the craving for alcohol, &c., through a process of evolution, which can only have been through the accumulation of inborn or of acquired variations, or both. We have already considered at length the question as to whether acquired variations are transmissible, and have decided that they are not, and therefore we may conclude, à priori, that