the earth must have been, if not
hot, at least tepid. One can easily imagine that the contemporaries of
the five-toed horse might have welcomed death as a happy release from
their too sultry existence.

"I suppose man is the only brewing animal known to scientific research.
All other creatures take their food and drink neat, or in a raw state.
Of course, almost all mammals are enabled by a highly ingenious
internal mechanism to brew milk, or some other lacteal substitute, but
this is performed by a natural, instinctive impulse towards the
preservation of their young and conserves none of the spirit of
artifice and calculation so necessary to authentic brewing operations.

"Brewing was possible only when the stability of the human race was,
more or less, assured and permanent. Our primal ancestors existed in a
state as nearly resembling chaos as well might be. They had not yet
aggregated into communities, but vast hordes of families--a father, an
uncertain number of mothers, and an astounding complexity of
children--wandered wherever food seemed most abundant, and fought with
or eluded such other families as they chanced upon. This state of
existence was too precarious and haphazard to allow of the niceties of
brewing being evolved.

"But the natural tendency of families to lengthen, the gregarious
instincts of the race, and the need of mutual protection and assistance
ultimately welded these indiscriminate families into communities of
ever-varying extent, and the movement of these huge troops and
transportation of their baggage becoming more and more difficult
(vehicles being unknown and horses, perhaps, treble-toed, wily and
ferocious) and food, which until then had only been obtained in a
fugitive state, becoming less easy of access, these communities were
forced to select a settled habitation, scratch the earth for provender,
settled down to the breeding of one-toed horses, and exercise the
respectable virtues of thrift and industry for their preservation.
Thus, laws were formulated, tentative and unsatisfactory at first, and
ever tending, as to this day, to become more complex and less
satisfactory. Villages took shape, straggled into towns, widened into
cities and coalesced into kingdoms and empires: and so, the
civilisation of which we are partakers crawled laboriously into being,
with the brewer somewhere in the centre, active, rubicund and
disputatious, as he has continued to date, with a seat on the County