of steam from drying the damp tobacco over the stoves; and his health and appetite were perfect to the day of his death:  he was a model of muscular and stomachic energy; in which his son, who neither smokes, snuffs, nor chews, by no means rivals him.”  But until we know precisely what capital of health the venerable tobacconist inherited from his fathers, and in what condition he transmitted it to his sons, the statement certainly has two edges.

For there are facts equally notorious on the other side.  It is not denied that it is found necessary to exclude tobacco, as a general rule, from insane asylums, or that it produces, in extreme cases, among perfectly sober persons, effects akin to delirium tremens.  Nor is it denied that terrible local diseases follow it,—­as, for instance, cancer of the mouth, which has become, according to the eminent surgeon, Brouisson, the disease most dreaded in the French hospitals.  He has performed sixty-eight operations for this, within fourteen years, in the Hospital St. Eloi, and traces it entirely to the use of tobacco.  Such facts are chiefly valuable as showing the tendency of the thing.  Where the evils of excess are so glaring, the advantages of even moderate use are questionable.  Where weak persons are made insane, there is room for suspicion that the strong may suffer unconsciously.  You may say that the victims must have been constitutionally nervous; but where is the native-born American who is not?

In France and England the recent inquiries into the effects of tobacco seem to have been a little more systematic than our own.  In the former country, the newspapers state, the attention of the Emperor was called to the fact that those pupils of the Polytechnic School who used this indulgence were decidedly inferior in average attainments to the rest.  This is stated to have led to its prohibition in the school, and to the forming of an anti-tobacco organization, which is said to be making great progress in France.  I cannot, however, obtain from any of our medical libraries any satisfactory information as to the French agitation, and am led by private advices to believe that even these general statements are hardly trustworthy.  The recent English discussions are, however, more easy of access.

“The Great Tobacco Question,” as the controversy in England was called, originated in a Clinical Lecture on Paralysis, by Mr. Solly, Surgeon of St. Thomas’s Hospital, which was published in the “Lancet,” December 13, 1856.  He incidentally spoke of tobacco as an important source of this disease, and went on to say,—­“I know of no single vice which does so much harm as smoking.  It is a snare and a delusion.  It soothes the excited nervous system at the time, to render it more irritable and feeble ultimately.  It is like opium in this respect; and if you want to know all the wretchedness which this drug can produce, you should read the ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.’” This statement was presently echoed by J. Ranald Martin, an eminent surgeon, “whose Eastern experience rendered his opinion of immense value,” and who used language almost identical with that of Mr. Solly:—­“I can state of my own observation, that the miseries, mental and bodily, which I have witnessed from the abuse of cigar-smoking, far exceed anything detailed in the ‘Confessions of an Opium-Eater.’”