Now starch is the great element, in all farinaceous articles, which is adapted to supply us with calorifacient food.  “In its original condition, either raw or when broken up by boiling, it does not appear that starch is capable of being absorbed by the alimentary canal.  By its conversion into sugar it can alone become a useful aliment.”  This is effected almost instantaneously by the saliva in the mouth, and at a slower rate in the stomach.

Obviously, then, if the use of tobacco interferes with the normal action of the saliva, and if the digestion of starch ends in the stomach, here is the strong point in the argument of the opponents of tobacco.  We should wonder at the discrepancy between physiology and facts, theory and the evidence of our senses and daily experience among the world of smokers, and be ready to renounce either science or “the weed.”  Fortunately for our peace of mind and for our respect for physiology, the first point of the proposition is not satisfactorily proved, and the second is untrue.  We are not certain that nicotin ruins ptyalin; we are certain that the functions of other organs are vicarious of those of the salivary glands.

We say that it is not satisfactorily proved that tobacco impairs the sugar-making function of the saliva.  At least, we have never seen the proof from recorded experiments.  Such may exist, but we have met only with loose assertions to this effect, of a similar nature to those hygienic dicta which we find bandied about in the would-be-physiological popular journals, which are so plentiful in this country, and which may be styled the “yellow-cover” literature of science.

We acknowledge this to be the weak point in our armor, and are open to further light.  Yet more, for the sake of hypothesis, we will assume it proved.  What follows?  Are we to get no more sugar while we smoke?  By no means.  Hard by the stomach lies the pancreas, an organ so similar in structure to the salivary glands, that even so minute an observer as Koelliker does not think it requisite to give it a separate description.  Its secretion, which is poured into the second stomach, contains a ferment analogous to that of the saliva, and amounts probably to about seven ounces a day.  The food, on leaving the stomach, is next subjected to its influence, together with that of the bile.  It helps digest fatty matters by its emulsive powers; it has been more recently supposed to form a sort of peptone with nitrogenized articles also; but, what is more to our purpose, it turns starch into sugar even more quickly than the saliva itself.  And even if the reformers were to beat us from this stronghold, by proving that tobacco impaired the saccharifying power of this organ also, we should still find the mixed fluids supplied by the smaller, but very numerous glands of the intestines, sufficient to accomplish the requisite modification of starch, though more slowly and to a less degree.