824 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



fritter away their minds and tempers on an infinity of pursuits, pur- 

 suits of business and pursuits of pleasure. If they did not all attain 

 Wordsworth's " sweet calm " or the " wide and luminous view " of 

 Goethe, at least they did not insist on barring the way to those blessed 

 goals. This hasty life of ours, these successive shocks of change and 

 alarm, this want of rest and leisure, all act or tend to act injuriously 

 on the stomach, and thence on the brain. It is not only our unwise 

 diet which afflicts the race with those " dolorous pains in the epigas- 

 trium," which one very learned lecturer on the philosophy of food as- 

 serts to be the note of this age and which I take to be a glorified 

 form of the homely stomach-ache. 



I suspect, too, tobacco may have something to say to it. Not that 

 I would say a word against that " plant divine of rarest virtue " for 

 those who can use it, being indeed myself a feeble unit of the society 

 of " blest tobacco-boys." An ingenious seeker after truth not long 

 ago published the result of his research into the effect of tobacco and 

 strong drink on the studious brain. It was a curious book, extremely 

 amusing, and not all so foolish as might be supposed. But some ran- 

 dom utterances there were, and none so random as those of one ab- 

 stemious student (nameless, if I remember right, but the style was 

 much the later style of Mr. Ruskin) who violently denounced tobacco 

 as a general curse, and refused it all virtues, on the ground that the 

 great men of old did very well without it. " Homer sang his deathless 

 song," so wrote this fearful man ; "Raphael painted his glorious Ma- 

 donnas, Luther preached, Guttenberg printed, Columbus discovered a 

 new world, before tobacco was heard of. No rations of tobacco were 

 served out to the heroes of Thermopylae ; no cigar strung up the 

 nerves of Socrates." Why, truly ; and Agamemnon I speak, of 

 course, under correction of Doctor Schliemann Agamemnon, I say, 

 knew not the name of Cockle, and Ulysses had never heard of the 

 lively and refreshing invention of the ingenious Mr. Eno ; yet who 

 will reason from that old-world ignorance that we might grow wise as 

 Ulysses and brave as Agamemnon if we put away these artificial stimu- 

 lants ? Nay, if it comes to that, have not some fine things too been 

 done since tobacco was introduced ? But we need not take this mod- 

 ern counter-blast too seriously. Probably men of sedentary habits 

 who smoke much are very moderate drinkers. He who takes tobacco 

 because he likes the flavor, and finds the use refreshing and soothing, 

 is not likely to take wine or other strong drinks in any quantity. I 

 do not mean that he will not consume them together ; that no man 

 capable of appreciating either will ever do. How sad soever be the 

 errors we have fallen into, at least we no longer share Madame Pur- 

 ganti's confusion of mistaking tobacco for a " concomitant of claret." 

 But the virtue of each I am not thinking of those who use them 

 merely from habit, or because others do, or for a purely sensual pleas- 

 ure the virtue of each is, I fancy, a little marred by an adherence to 



