Yesterday evening, at the Temperance Hall, Pitt Street, the Rev. D. Allen delivered a lecture upon "Alcohol and its Origin," Mr. John Davies being in the chair.

The chairman having introduced the Reverend lecturer with a few appropriate remarks, the Rev. Daniel Allen opened his address by drawing the attention of his hearers to the vast amount of misery, disease, and death caused by the use of alcoholic poison. Day by day the saddest possible proof was afforded of the baleful effects of this poison, by the reckless use of which thousands of men and women died every year. He had, whilst in Melbourne, for some time endeavoured to compile a tolerably comprehensive statistical statement as to the number of deaths in that colony openly attributed to alcohol, but he had been so overwhelmed by the data which accumulated on his hands that he was compelled to give up that melancholy task.

The terrible death-dealing effects of alcohol were not to be denied by any one; insanity was one of its common results; and disease and death were its everyday work, spreading sorrow, crime, and desolation everywhere around us. Alcohol was an element which he maintained to be manifestly and purely evil - an element which it was absolutely blasphemous to say had originated with Almighty God. It did not exist in the works of nature, except they were in a state of utter decay. In beer and wine, in spirits, and in all other intoxicating liquors, this alcoholic element was to be found in more or less deleterious quantities. These compounds were all the result of corrupted matter alone. But in all that which the Creator himself had made no trace of any such an element as alcohol was to be found. Sin came into existence through the fall of man from his first exalted state of innocence and purity; and alcohol was, in like manner, brought into being through a similar course of corruption, until what was originally good and excellent was made injurious by being put through a rotting or putrifying process. He defied any man to produce one particle of alcohol, unless the innocent productions of nature should have been transmuted and decomposed by putrefaction.

The lecturer then specially referred to several of the different stages of beermaking and winemaking, with a view to shew that the fermentation process was nothing more or less than a gradual corruption and decay of what God had made nutritive, and beneficial to the physical nature of man. This had been most strikingly proved by learned German chemists. Baron Liebig, one of the distinguished German chemists, had said: "Fermentation is nothing else but the putrefaction of a substance containing no nitrogen; ferment or yeast is a substance in a state of putrefaction, the atoms of which are in continual motion. The fermentation of grape juice begins with a chemical action which is opposed to the vital one. In all fungi analysis has detected the presence of sugar, which, during their vital process is not resolved into alcohol and carbonic acid; but after their death (from the moment that a change in their colour and consistency is perceived) the vinous fermentation sets in. It is the very reverse to the vital process to which this (alcohol) must be ascribed. Life is opposed to putrefaction. Fermentation and putrefaction are stages of their return to less complex formations. These very forces produce changes of form and state, when, after death, their action is no longer opposed by the vital forces. Into the new compounds none of the elements of the ferment enter."

It was an absolute violation of the laws which God had established in nature to take putrid or corrupted matter, in place of food. Malt was simply rotten barley; wine was the rotten juice of the grape; and rum was simply rotten sugar. The only reason why men took such alterations and mutilations of God's combinations of nutritious properties in matter was an unreasoning desire to gratify the palate. Alcohol was clearly a poison formed of the decomposition of vegetable matter, just as prussic acid (one of the most deadly poisons), was formed from the decomposition of animal matter. The Reverend Gentleman proceeded, in a thoroughly practical strain, to shew, from chemical data, that alcohol was as injurious to the stomach as other poisons were to the head, and concluded with several humourous illustrations of the absurd hallucinations of those who partook of alcohol. A vote of thanks terminated the proceedings.