Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/518

502, and the craving presents a similar automatic and periodical rule as has been observed in relation to the habitual employment of other active and enticing poisonous compounds.

The nature of these cravings is not more singular than their intensity, when once they have been acquired. The most practiced craver can rarely succeed in explaining upon what the craving really depends. It is an indefinable desire. It is neither thirst, nor hunger, nor pleasure, nor reasonable want. It is rather like a wish to be relieved for the moment of some indescribable sense of pain or discomfort. It is often periodical in its occurrence, and it can, I believe, always be made perfectly periodical, a fact which connects it very closely with the work of the organic nervous system. In a word, in the confirmed craver the work of the organic nervous system, which is singularly periodical and rhythmical in the natural state, is, by these agents, turned into a new direction, and is made to take on a new action which in steady form repeats itself. I have in my house an eight-day clock which, though a century old, does good and faithful work, except at two times in the twenty-four hours, when it goes periodically astray. From some little twist or wear in the machinery, it stops for a moment in the act of striking at one particular stroke of the bell, and on listening to it it seems as if the striking had concluded. Then it strikes feebly and goes on again all right. The working of the involuntary nervous system in health is as automatic and regular as the working of the timepiece; damaged, it is as systematically deranged at particular periods.

The injury from intoxicants, after the first automatic derangement has been established by them, is not to be measured altogether by the first and usual derangement. Unfortunately, the action of the intoxicant extends beyond the mere effect of the craving that springs from it, and involves in its evils structural parts of the animal body. The nutrition of the degraded structures, the sense of muscular and mental fatigue is soon rendered easy of development; and, pari passu, the mind, seeking for aid in the influences it likes, finds a supposed aid in the intoxicant. It takes the destructive agent more frequently, thereby establishing a more frequent periodicity of desire, and a more earnest craving. By these combined influences, as is so commonly observed in the intemperate from alcohol, the craving increases as the animal powers decline, and the tendency to death is vastly quickened in its course. To ordinary comprehension, in these instances, the craving and the sinking are the same acts. They become so at last in effect, but their beginnings are quite distinct, and they are, in the strictest expression of fact, distinct phenomena even to the end.

The craving for these intoxicants, so strong in the habituated among men, is not confined to human kind. The beast that can be brought to taste these agents, and that can be affected by them, can be equally well taught to crave for them, and to look out for them also