Genre:

News-Commentary, Drollery

Subjects:

Narcotics, Mental Illness, Language, Charlatanry, Scientific Practitioners

    Discusses a paper on 'Dipsomania' or the 'passion for intoxicating drink' read by Thomas L Mackesy to a Dublin meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (the paper is referred to in Anon 1862c). Questions the intelligence of those who use the term in this way, on the grounds that they appear to have linked 'habitual thirst' with 'habitual drunkenness'. Concludes by claiming that owing to their taste for drink, 'philosophers' have a more profound acquaintance with the 'philosophy of drunkenness' than anybody else.