Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: m ALCOHOL THE SPECIFIC CAUSE OP DEGENEKACY AS far as the knowledge of man extends, the universe is undergoing constant change. It is of two kinds: processes of building or evolution, and processes of decay or disintegration. Some planetary systems, suns and worlds are forming. Others are disintegrating. In the realm of living things these changes are more advanced, complex, and varied than are the atomic and geological changes in the inorganic world. In the animal kingdom the changes are more advanced, complex, and varied than in the plant kingdom. In the division of the vertebrates, animals with a backbone, the changes are more advanced, complex, and varied than in the division of the invertebrates, animals without a backbone. Mammals, animals that suckle their young, are the highest in evolution of the vertebrates, and man is the highest of the mammals. In man, the highest evolutionary forces are the consciousness of God, the sense of right and wrong, love, self-sacrifice, self-control, and the sense of duty. As pointed out in previous chapters, an elemental substance, protoplasm, composed largely of water and protein, composes the physical machinery of all life and of the evolution of all life in plants, animals and man. Since alcohol attacks this elemental protoplasm, drawing out the water and clotting or coagulating the protein, its effect is to tear down cell complexes and force them back toward simpler forms and so stop further evolution and prematurely precipitate the processes of dissolution. In the study of alcoholic poisoning from the standpoint of biology, we noted this alcoholic dissolution in single cells, more marked in the nucleus and complex bodies around the nucleus, the highest, tenderest portion and the latest in the cell's evolution. In th...