The controversy had its course, and ended, like most controversies, without establishing anything.  The editor of the “Lancet,” to be sure, summed up the evidence very fairly, and it is worth while to quote him:—­“It is almost unnecessary to make a separate inquiry into the pathological conditions which follow upon excessive smoking.  Abundant evidence has been adduced of the gigantic evils which attend the abuse of tobacco.  Let it be granted at once that there is such a thing as moderate smoking, and let it be admitted that we cannot accuse tobacco of being guilty of the whole of Cullen’s ‘Nosology’; it still remains that there is a long catalogue of frightful penalties attached to its abuse.”  He then proceeds to consider what is to be called abuse:  as, for instance, smoking more than one or two cigars or pipes daily,—­smoking too early in the day or too early in life,—­and in general, the use of tobacco by those with whom it does not agree,—­which rather reminds one of the early temperance pledges, which bound a man to drink no more rum than he found to be good for him.  But the Chief Justice of the Medical Court finally instructs his jury of readers that young men should give up a dubious pleasure for a certain good, and abandon tobacco altogether:—­“Shun the habit of smoking as you would shun self-destruction.  As you value your physical and moral well-being, avoid a habit which for you can offer no advantage to compare with the dangers you incur.”

Yet, after all, neither he nor his witnesses seem fairly to have hit upon what seem to this present writer the two incontrovertible arguments against tobacco; one being drawn from theory, and the other from practice.

First, as to the theory of the thing.  The laws of Nature warn every man who uses tobacco for the first time, that he is dealing with a poison.  Nobody denies this attribute of the plant; it is “a narcotic poison of the most active class.”  It is not merely that a poison can by chemical process be extracted from it, but it is a poison in its simplest form.  Its mere application to the skin has often produced uncontrollable nausea and prostration.  Children have in several cases been killed by the mere application of tobacco ointment to the head.  Soldiers have simulated sickness by placing it beneath the armpits,—­though in most cases our regiments would probably consider this a mistaken application of the treasure.  Tobacco, then, is simply and absolutely a poison.

Now to say that a substance is a poison is not to say that it inevitably kills; it may be apparently innocuous, if not incidentally beneficial.  King Mithridates, it is said, learned habitually to consume these dangerous commodities; and the scarcely less mythical Du Chaillu, after the fatigues of his gorilla warfare, found decided benefit from two ounces of arsenic.  But to say that a substance is a poison is to say at least that it is a noxious drug,—­that it is a medicine, not an aliment,—­that