hundred cases, testified that alcohol, taken in excess, produced
different forms of mental disease, of which he mentioned four classes:
1. _Mania a potu_, or alcoholic mania. 2. The monomania of suspicion. 3.
Chronic alcoholism, characterized by failure of the memory and power of
judgment, with partial paralysis--generally ending fatally. 4.
Dypsomania, or an _irresistible_ craving for alcoholic stimulants,
occuring very frequently, paroxysmally, and with constant liability to
periodical exacerbations, when the craving becomes altogether
uncontrollable. Of this latter form of disease, he says: "This is
invariably associated with a certain _impairment of the intellect, and
of the affections and the moral powers_."

Dr. Alexander Peddie, a physician of over thirty-seven years' practice
in Edinburgh, gave, in his evidence, many remarkable instances of the
moral perversions that followed continued drinking.

RELATION BETWEEN INSANITY AND DRUNKENNESS.

Dr. John Nugent said that his experience of twenty-six years among
lunatics, led him to believe that there is a very close relation between
the results of the abuse of alcohol and insanity. The population of
Ireland had decreased, he said, two millions in twenty-five years, but
there was the same amount of insanity now that there was before. He
attributed this, in a great measure, to indulgence in drink.

Dr. Arthur Mitchell, Commissioner of Lunacy for Scotland, testified that
the excessive use of alcohol caused a large amount of the lunacy, crime
and pauperism of that country. In some men, he said, habitual drinking
leads to other diseases than insanity, because the effect is always in
the direction of the proclivity, but it is certain that there are many
in whom there is a clear proclivity to insanity, _who would escape that
dreadful consummation but for drinking; excessive drinking in many
persons determining the insanity to which they are, at any rate,
predisposed_. The children of drunkards, he further said, are in a
larger proportion idiotic than other children, and in a larger
proportion become themselves drunkards; they are also in a larger
proportion liable to the ordinary forms of acquired insanity.

Dr. Winslow Forbes believed that in the habitual drunkard the whole
nervous structure, and the brain especially, became poisoned by alcohol.
All the mental symptoms which you see accompanying ordinary
intoxication, he remarks, result from the poisonous effects of a