7 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ruentary contact of tobacco with the nerves of taste produces instant 

 and uncontrollable nausea, though I am exceedingly fond of smoking, 

 and have always been reckoned a connoisseur in flavors. I should 

 add, however, that offensive sights, as of a person deformed or idiotic, 

 and offensive odors, have the same effect, and instantaneously produce 

 violent nausea. 



The physiological effect of tobacco, when I first began to use it, 

 was intense and disagreeable, producing contraction of the pupil of 

 the eye, dizziness, labored breathing, and considerable tendency to 

 spasms ; and as these symptoms were more marked with the pipe than 

 with the cigar, in which the pyrieline is mostly disengaged by the sur- 

 rounding atmosphere, I conclude that they were due in the main not 

 to the nicotine, but to the pyrieline and picoline bases, which are more 

 immediately responsible for the first poisonous action of tobacco-juice 

 when swallowed. Their action is more rapid when taken internally 

 than when subcutaneously injected ; and, though substantially iden- 

 tical with that of nicotine, is rather less distinctly narcotic, rather less 

 immediately nervous, and rather more definite in its tendency to pro- 

 duce convulsions. As the nerves become habituated to the narcotic, 

 a state of pleasant and exhilarated reverie, after smoking a few min- 

 utes, superseded the more obtrusive symptoms, and lasted sometimes 

 half an hour or more, when languor supervened ; and, as the habit be- 

 came settled, it was accompanied by a mental aura, marked by gen- 

 eral tendency to abstraction, and by a dreamy, metaphysical habit of 

 thought. Vague generalizations took the place of real observation in 

 the physical sciences to a greater extent than is compatible with prog- 

 ress in physics. I was intolerant of particulars, and impatient with 

 nicety of discrimination, although I had previously been of extremely 

 analytic habit, and noted in the academy and at college for subtilty 

 as an algebraist. I had my logic of shadows and reveries, and was, 

 withal, a little inclined to mysticism after the German pattern, and to 

 vast theological speculations. 



At the same time there was some gain in repose of nerve from the 

 use of the weed, and some trifling gain in mental concentration, par- 

 ticularly as respected the study of Hegel, Schelling, Kant, and the 

 German metaphysicians at large, which happened just then to be in 

 my way. Hegel's anima mundi and I were on terms of familiar in- 

 timacy, and Schelling's fine discrimination between the different shades 

 of shadows was accepted as really valuable in its contributions to philo- 

 sophical literature. I mean no disrespect to Hegel and Kant, whose 

 definition of life as self-aim has the merit of brevity, and will, perhaps, 

 by-and-by, have to be incorporated into biology ; only generalizing 

 is by so many degrees easier than investigation that men come, I 

 think, sooner or later some sooner, some later to have a kind of 

 contempt for mere metaphysical speculation, however imposing its 

 painted bubbles of imagined reality, and to long for a little truth 



