om the benumbing effects of frost; for I have more than once
seen our people in a state so exactly resembling that of the most
stupid intoxication, that I should certainly have charged them with the
offence had I not been quite sure that no possible means were afforded
them on Melville Island to procure anything stronger than snow water."
The same confusion is frequently found in cases which come before the
police-courts, people being arrested as "drunk and disorderly" who can
prove that the symptoms were not due to over-indulgence in drink at all.
Some individuals have, moreover, a special idiosyncrasy or
susceptibility to alcohol, due to heredity or to one of the sequelae of
sunstroke or cranial injury. The children of drunkards are usually very
susceptible to the poison, becoming intoxicated by a far smaller
quantity than is needed by a normal person.

But, as a rule, the phenomena of drunkenness are actually due to
excessive consumption of some intoxicating liquid. The physiological
action of all such agents may be described as a cumulative production of
paralysis of various parts of the nervous system, but this effect
results only in doses of a certain amount--a dose which varies with the
agent, the race and the individual. Even the cup so often said to
"cheer, but not inebriate," cannot be regarded as altogether free from
the last-named effect. Tea-sots are well known to be affected with
palpitation and irregularity of the heart, as well as with more or less
sleeplessness, mental irritability and muscular tremors, which in some
culminate in paralysis; while positive intoxication has been known to be
the result of the excessive use of strong tea. In short, from tea to
haschisch we have, through hops, alcohol, tobacco and opium, a sort of
graduated scale of intoxicants, which stimulate in small doses and
narcotize in larger,--the narcotic dose having no stimulating properties
whatever, and only appearing to possess them from the fact that the
agent can only be gradually taken up by the blood, and the system thus
comes primarily under the influence of a stimulant dose. In certain
circumstances and with certain agents--as in the production of
chloroform narcosis--this precursory stage is capable of being much
abbreviated, if not altogether annihilated; while with other agents--as
tea--the narcotic stage is by no means always or readily produced.

No subject in modern times has led to more extreme opinions than this of