By repeated fermentations in preparing snuff, much of the nicotin is evaporated and lost.  Yet snuff-takers impair the sense of smell, and ruin the voice, by clogging up the passages with the finer particles of the powder.  The functions of the labyrinthine caverns of the nose and forehead, and of the delicate osseous laminae which constitute the sounding-boards of vocalization, are thus destroyed.

Chewing is the most constant, as it is the nastiest habit.  The old chewer, safe in the blunted irritability of the salivary glands, can continue his practice all night, if he be so infatuated, without inconvenience.  In masticating tobacco, nicotin and nicotianin are rolled about in the mouth with the quid, but are not probably so quickly absorbed as when in the gaseous state.  Yet chewers are the greatest spitters, and have a characteristic drooping of the angle of the lower lip, which points to loss of power in the leavator muscles.

Latakia, Shiraz, Manila, Cuba, Virginia, and Maryland produce the most valuable tobaccoes.  Though peculiar soils and dressings may impart a greater aroma and richness to the plant, by the variations in the quantity of nicotianin, as compared with the other organic elements, yet we are inclined to think that the diminished proportion of nicotin in the best varieties in the cause of their superior flavor to the rank Northern tobaccoes, and that it is mainly because they are milder that they are most esteemed.  So, too, the cigar improves with age, because a certain amount of nicotin evaporates and escapes.  Taste in cigars varies, however, from the Austrian government article, a very rank “long-nine,” with a straw running through the centre to improve its suction, to the Cuban cigarrito, whose ethereal proportions three whiffs will exhaust.

The manufacture of smoking-tobaccoes is as much and art in Germany as getting up a fancy brand of cigars is here; and the medical philosopher of that country will gravely debate whether “Kanaster” or “Varinas” be best suited for certain forms of convalescence; tobacco being almost as indispensable as gruel, in returning health.  We think the light pipe-smoker will find a combination of German and Turkish smoking-tobaccoes a happy thought.  The old smoker may secure the best union of delicacy and strength in the Virginia “natural leaf.”

Among the eight or ten species of the tobacco-plant now recognized by botanists, the Nicotiana tabacum and the Nicotiana rustica hold the chief place.  Numerous varieties of each of these, however, are named and exist.

We condense from De Bow’s “Industrial Resources of the South and West” a brief account of tobacco-culture in this country.  “The tobacco is best sown from the 10th to the 20th of March, and a rich loam is the most favorable soil.  The plants are dressed with a mixture of ashes, plaster, soot, salt, sulphur, soil, and manure.”  After they are transplanted, we are told that “the